It’s Friday, the day of the week when I pass along quotations intended to be uplifting or thought-provoking. It is also two days before Christmas, an occasion in which I annually quote from Charles Dickens’ influential little masterpiece.
A best-seller on both sides of the ocean, “A Christmas Carol” was not only widely read when it appeared in 1843, but widely plagiarized. Still, selling 6,000 copies of a book in a single printing in the first weeks that it came out was enough to pay off the debts of a struggling writer with a large family. Yes, in case you never thought about it: Dickens modeled Bob Cratchit after himself. This, in turn, presents an interesting question: Who is Ebenezer Scrooge based on?
Literary sleuths have identified various possibilities. One of them is Jemmy Wood, a Gloucester banker and one of Britain’s first millionaires. A character named “Dismal Jemmy” appears in “The Pickwick Papers,” Dickens’ first novel. In “Bleak House,” Dickens mentions litigation among a rich man’s heirs that consumed most of the estate, which parallels what happens to the fortune of “The Gloucester Miser.” Finally, there is a last, albeit vague, reference to Wood in Dickens’ last novel, written two decades after “A Christmas Carol.”
Another possible inspiration for Ebenezer Scrooge is a wealthy businessman and Berkshire MP named John Elwes. Although Elwes died before Dickens was born, the author would have been familiar with “Elwes the Miser,” because a biography of his life went through 12 editions and established him as the prototypical penny-pincher of the pre-Victorian age.
But a novel, by definition, is fiction and the book in question is a ghost story, for goodness sakes. “A Christmas Carol” showcased Charles Dickens’ imagination, as well as his conscience, so let’s be as charitable as possible toward Jemmy Wood and John Elwes. The evidence against the former is that Wood traipsed down to the docks to fill his pockets with coal that fell from the ships and that he walked everywhere to save money on cab fare (the cabs in question being horse-drawn carriages.) Perhaps he hated litter and waste, or was an early believer in physical exercise. Maybe Jemmy Wood was an animal lover, who thought horses were ill-used as beasts of burden.
As for John Elwes, he was a quirky skinflint, but more than that, too. In the “Life of the Late John Elwes,” his biographer Edward Topham offers this description:
“All earthly comforts he voluntarily denied himself: he would walk home in the rain, in London, sooner than pay a shilling for a coach: he would sit in wet clothes sooner than have a fire to dry them: he would eat his provisions in the last stage of putrefaction sooner than have afresh joint from the butcher’s…”
So far, so good. But Topham also described Elwes as a friendly and considerate man who could be monetarily generous with friends and strangers alike. “His avarice,” wrote Topham, “consisted not in hard-heartedness, but in self-denial.”
John Elwes, in other words, possessed the traits of Ebenezer Scrooge both before and after he was haunted by Jacob Marley and the three ghosts of Christmas.
Although “A Christmas Carol” has proved to be one of the most enduring yarns in the English language, some of the claims made about the story are overblown. Charles Dickens did not “invent” how we celebrate the day, as has been said. For one thing, no Christmas tree appears in that story. And though the book certainly fired up the imaginations of readers in America as well as Great Britain, George Washington was celebrating Christmas as early as 1759, when he made a point of marrying Martha Custis on the 12th day of Christmas, which had long been a season of feasting and merriment and churchgoing.
This raises another interesting angle: the religiosity of Dickens’ novel. One can hardly assert that a narrative driven by ghosts is a secular story. But we can say that “A Christmas Carol” has an ecumenical quality to it that transcends Christianity, and even religious faith of any kind. It’s a story about second chances, which are as American as apple pie, and presumably as universal as the human experience itself.
At the beginning of the novel, Ebenezer Scrooge’s nephew Fred seamlessly blends the secular and the faithful while making all of the action that ensues accessible to the believing and the non-believing reader alike. It comes in the form of a soliloquy in response to Scrooge’s observation that spreading Christmas cheer is a sucker’s game that hasn’t profited Fred at all:
'There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say. Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round — apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that — as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!
'
As motion pictures replaced print as the preeminent medium for Yuletide entertainment, an all-star team of Hollywood heavyweights played Scrooge through the decades: Lionel Barrymore, Alastair Sim, George C. Scott, Albert Finney, Michael Caine, Patrick Stewart, Will Farrell, Tom Hanks, Kelsey Grammar, Jim Carrey, and more.
Filmmakers like to update classic stories, too, and these adaptations range from Frank Capra’s classic “It’s a Wonderful Life” to the less-subtly titled “Scrooged,” an underappreciated 1988 vehicle for Bill Murray. His updated version of the Ebenezer Scrooge character is “Frank Cross,” an arrogant, selfish, and vain television executive played to perfection.
Bill Murray inhabits the role as though he’s in on the joke, the joke being that in today’s culture you can be as terrible a person as Ebenezer Scrooge and not only get rich, but also famous -- even beloved. In the end, thankfully, Frank Cross sees the light anyway and sums it up neatly for an audience accustomed to being spoon-fed moral lessons. He does it expertly, however, and with a nice kicker from “Calvin Cooley,” who plays the Tiny Tim role in the remake (and as a boy who has been traumatized to the point where he no longer speaks):
'It's Christmas Eve! It's the one night of the year when we all act a little nicer, we smile a little easier, we cheer a little more. For a couple of hours out of the whole year, we are the people that we always hoped we would be. It's a miracle. It's really a sort of a miracle. Because it happens every Christmas Eve…I know what I am talking about. You have to do something. You have to take a chance. You do have to get involved. There are people that are having trouble making their miracle happen. There are people that don't have enough to eat, or people that are cold. You can go out and say hello to these people. You can take an old blanket out of the closet and say "Here!", you can make them a sandwich and say "Oh, by the way, here!" I get it now! And if you give, then it can happen, then the miracle can happen to you! It's not just the poor and the hungry, it's everybody's who's gotta have this miracle! And it can happen tonight for all of you! If you believe in this spirit thing, the miracle will happen and then you'll want it to happen again tomorrow. You won't be one of these bastards who says, "Christmas is once a year and it's a fraud", it's NOT! It can happen every day, you've just got to want that feeling….You'll want it every day of your life and it can happen to you! I believe in it now! I believe it's going to happen to me now! I'm ready for it! And it's great. It's a good feeling, it's really better than I've felt in a long time. I'm ready. Have a Merry Christmas, everybody.
'
At this point, Calvin steps forward and Frank asks him, “Did I forget something, big man?”
Calvin nods and then speaks his first words in five years: “God bless us, everyone!”
And those are our quotes of the week.
Carl M. Cannon
Washington Bureau chief, RealClearPolitics
@CarlCannon (Twitter)
ccannon@realclearpolitics.com