A Christmas Carol: Perspectives
Today is
a rather unusual day – rather than posting from a desk cluttered with
books, papers “to do” notes and a ringing telephone, today I am posting
from my kitchen table, complete with a fresh cup of coffee and a warmed
piece of Kringla. (Ahh… Norwegian pastries.)
Yes,
today is the start of a Christmas vacation. It's complete with
all of the usual last minute chores – cleaning, cooking and wrapping
the last few little presents to put under our tree.
Over the
past few weeks there have also been the usual airings of
“Christmas-themed” programming, on television and on the radio.
(Four Des Moines radio stations have taken on the “All Christmas Music
All The Time” format.)
One
thing that I never miss this time of year is either a performance – or
television airing – of Charles Dicken's “A Christmas Carol”.
(Better yet, of course, is reading the novel.)
Dicken's theme in “A Christmas Carol” is one of confronting the
inequity – and morality – of the English class system and the attitudes
that inequity breeds.
One passage from “A Christmas Carol” is particularly haunting:
They
were a boy and a girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but
prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have
filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a
stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted
them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat
enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no
degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the
mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and
dread.
Scrooge
started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried
to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather
than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.
'Spirit, are they yours?' Scrooge could say no more.
'They
are Man's,' said the Spirit, looking down upon them. 'And they cling to
me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is
Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware
this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the
writing be erased. Deny it!' cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand
towards the city. 'Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your
factious purposes, and make it worse! And abide the end!'
'Have they no refuge or resource?' cried Scrooge.
'Are
there no prisons?' said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time
with his own words. 'Are there no workhouses?'
Dickens
was attacking the inequity of the class system of Victorian England –
where the difference between the “haves” and “have nots” was
particularly striking.
Dickens
drew that line quite strongly between Ebenezer Scrooge and his
employee, Bob Cratchit. However, Dickens did not draw a line
between the relative status of the “Good Nephew” Fred and the poor Bob
Cratchit.
Dickens,
in fact – seems to be a product of the system that he lived in.
His solution for the inequities of Victorian England? That the
upper class people be “nice”, just like the Good Nephew Fred.
George Orwell in later years would find that notion to be particularly frustrating:
The
truth is that Dickens’s criticism of society is almost exclusively
moral. Hence the utter lack of any constructive suggestion anywhere in
his work. He attacks the law, parliamentary government, the educational
system and so forth, without ever clearly suggesting what he would put
in their places. Of course it is not necessarily the business of a
novelist, or a satirist, to make constructive suggestions, but the
point is that Dickens’s attitude is at bottom not even destructive.
There is no clear sign that he wants the existing order to be
overthrown, or that he believes it would make very much difference if
it were overthrown. For in reality his target is not so much society as
‘human nature’. It would be difficult to point anywhere in his books to
a passage suggesting that the economic system is wrong as a system.
Nowhere, for instance, does he make any attack on private enterprise or
private property. Even in a book like Our Mutual Friend, which turns on
the power of corpses to interfere with living people by means of
idiotic wills, it does not occur to him to suggest that individuals
ought not to have this irresponsible power. Of course one can draw this
inference for oneself, and one can draw it again from the remarks about
Bounderby’s will at the end of Hard Times, and indeed from the whole of
Dickens’s work one can infer the evil of laissez-faire capitalism; but
Dickens makes no such inference himself. It is said that Macaulay
refused to review Hard Times because he disapproved of its ‘sullen
Socialism’. Obviously Macaulay is here using the word ‘Socialism’ in
the same sense in which, twenty years ago, a vegetarian meal or a
Cubist picture used to be referred to as ‘Bolshevism’. There is not a
line in the book that can properly be called Socialistic; indeed, its
tendency if anything is pro-capitalist, because its whole moral is that
capitalists ought to be kind, not that workers ought to be rebellious.
Bounder by is a bullying windbag and Gradgrind has been morally
blinded, but if they were better men, the system would work well enough
that, all through, is the implication. And so far as social criticism
goes, one can never extract much more from Dickens than this, unless
one deliberately reads meanings into him. His whole ‘message’ is one
that at first glance looks like an enormous platitude: If men would
behave decently the world would be decent.
So, what does that mean to me, as I putter around these few days before the Christmas holiday?
Simple –
particularly when I think about what it means to be a member of the
“Democratic Party”, and the tussle that will likely occur over the
direction of the leadership and members.
Will we
stand for the “Good Nephew Fred”, who was as comfortable in life and
profit as his Uncle Scrooge – or will we stand for the “Bob Cratchits”
of the world, who suffer under long hours, low wages, no health
insurance and the deterioration of economic security in 21st Century
America?
The answer to me is rather obvious.
Blog For Iowa 