What do you want for Christmas? How about something scary? That might seem peculiar to holiday revelers today, but in Victorian England, the Christmas ghost story was a cherished ritual of the season. Families would gather around the fire on Christmas Eve and listen to terrifying tales. (Hey, it could be worse— consider spending the festive occasion arguing with relatives about the election results.)
Charles Dickens, for his part, may not have invented the concept, but he did more than anyone to popularize it. His first excursion into the scary Yuletide story in chapter 28 of The Pickwick Papers (1836) established an appealing formula—one that even the author himself imitated seven years later with A Christmas Carol. Yet today, long after the Christmas ghost story has disappeared from view, only Dickens's short novel has survived to remind us of this once flourishing sub-genre.
This mostly forgotten tradition exerted a powerful impact on the evolution of horror fiction. M.R. James’s Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), one of the most popular genre works of its era, is a compilation of tales he read aloud to guests on Christmas Eve. In describing his 1898 short novel The Turn of the Screw , Henry James noted that "it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be." Even H.P. Lovecraft set his short story "The Festival" at Christmas time, and as late as 1982 Canadian author Robertson Davies published a collection of ghost tales, High Spirits , that he had written to entertain students at an annual Christmas party during his tenure as Master of Massey College at the University of Toronto.
But Dickens did something even more antiquated and charmingly out-of-date with A Christmas Carol . He managed to combine horror and sentimentality, and create a terrifying tale that also conveyed an uplifting moral message. You won’t find that anywhere in Poe , Lovecraft , or most other purveyors of horror fiction. Perhaps Richard Matheson came the closest with his unclassifiable novel What Dreams May Come , but he still couldn't capture the wistful nostalgic tone that Dickens somehow managed to evoke in his ghost story. For better or worse, Dickens created a type of gruesome yet beguiling narrative that no one even aspires to write in the current day.
In many ways, Dickens was merely returning to the earliest origins of the ghost story. The oldest examples of these narratives are found in myths about a journey to the underworld, and they have been told everywhere in the world. But when an ancient hero journeyed to Hades, it was almost always for noble purposes, as part of a higher calling. In traditional societies, these stories may have frightened some listeners, but the aim was never merely to scare. The tales also served as sources of communal wisdom, cherished tradition and shared values. In other words, Dickens wasn't that far removed from the shamanic belief systems and Orphic worldview of ancient and folkloric storytellers.
Many readers nowadays probably dismiss A Christmas Carol as too sentimental for prevailing sensibilities and tastes. But I find both the premise and the execution compelling, and the plot even more plausible—at least from the standpoint of individual psychology—than most of the canonic stories in the genre. After all, wouldn't you want to learn something from any ghosts you encountered? Wouldn't you ask questions, much like Scrooge does in these pages? Wouldn't the experience change your life and behavior in the aftermath? Perhaps some people would run away from a spook, but I suspect that many would follow Dickens’s lead and stay around for a little conversation.
Yes, I like this Dickensian approach to the subject. If I met a ghost, I’d like to benefit from the encounter. There's a pleasing karmic balance in the notion that scary encounters also bring with them compensating gifts. If Newton had constructed a law of horror fiction, he would have insisted that every frightening action inspires an equal reaction. That is the logic of A Christmas Carol .
Is the plot of this story still familiar to most people, even those who don’t pick up 19th century literature? Certainly the character of Scrooge must still have a near universal name recognition—although who know how many first encountered the name via Donald Duck’s uncle, the stingy Scrooge McDuck? The name has even turned into a generic term for a curmudgeonly miser.
I note that charitable donations rose in England after the publication of Dickens's book.
Yet the name could just as easily symbolize the opposite. At the end of this story, Ebenezer Scrooge is transformed by the visions offered through the intermediation of his three spectral visitors. The Ghost of Christmas Past has shown him long-forgotten scenes from Scrooge’s own youth. The Ghost of Christmas Present has given him a glimpse the current-day misery caused by Scrooge’s cold-hearted ways. Finally, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come has revealed the circumstances of the miser's forthcoming death, and the sorry legacy he will leave to the world. Scrooge is shaken to his very soul by these sights, and implores the final ghost for the opportunity to alter this looming destiny.
So why doesn't the name Scrooge signify a morally transformed person? Why is our protagonist remembered for who he was, not what he became? Can I launch a Scrooge image rehabilitation campaign? Can we get him a statue or at least put his image on a Christmas stamp?
I note, in passing, that charitable donations rose in England after the publication of Dickens’s book. "More extensive kindness has been dispensed to those who are in want at the present season than at any preceding one,” announced Gentleman’s Magazine in 1844. There are many examples from other countries of readers inspired to extraordinary acts of generosity on the basis of this short novel.
I suspect that Dickens would have taken more pride in these socioeconomic results than in the purely literary legacy of his work. When he founded the journal Household Words, he wrote to Elizabeth Gaskell that its purpose was “the raising up of those that are down and the general improvement of our social condition.” He lived up to that promise in his own work, even courting the disapproval of those who reject or ridicule didactic fiction. Dickens saw things differently from them. He wanted his books to have an impact that continued long after the readers put them back on the shelf. With regard to A Christmas Carol , he wrote of his audience: "May it haunt their houses pleasantly."
Perhaps the notion of a ghost who delivers revelations and second chances would fall flat in the present day. I can’t imagine a literary agent even agreeing to read the manuscript, or Hollywood studios bidding for film rights. But I am convinced we could still learn something from this old story—and I’m not talking about how to scare youngsters around a fire on Christmas Eve. Maybe you should even buy a few copies and give them (as Christmas gifts, of course!) to the Scrooges in your life.
Ted Gioia writes about music, literature and popular culture. His latest book is How to Listen to Jazz from Basic Books.