Scrooge is dead: to begin with.

This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story that I am going to review.

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There'll be parties for hosting
Marshmallows for toasting
And caroling out in the snow
There'll be scary ghost stories
And tales of the glories
Of Christmases long, long ago

Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol has planted itself as a foundational fixture of Christmas ever since its publication on December 19th, 1843. The entire first print run sold out before Christmas Eve five days later; it has not been out of print since.

If A Christmas Carol—or a surface-level engagement with it—has comfortably settled into the canon of Christmas, it has also profoundly sunk itself into the canon of my own life. Since this is a review of the book and not of me, I will spare you the details, but suffice it to say I read it every Christmas (my kids are now old enough to suffer through it being read aloud), build a Lego re-creation every second Sunday of Advent (yes, Virginia, there is an official Dickens Lego set), and have mentally added it to the bundle of books that will be distributed to all of my grand-progeny upon my death.

Everyone quotes the book (often without knowing) when they say “humbug” at Christmas;^[1] everyone quotes it (definitely knowing) when they say “God bless us, every one!” Everyone says The Muppet Christmas Carol is their favorite adaptation—which is not my opinion, but more on that later. Everyone knows the story: Scrooge’s irredeemable miserly nature and his miraculous repentance upon seeing his gravestone and coming face to face with his own death.

Except that last point is completely wrong.

There’s a delicious little question at its core that almost all adaptations tend to miss: a question which meditates on what we owe our fellow man. The answer is more demanding than most adaptations let on.

If you somehow aren’t part of the “everyone”, I’ll give you a flyby. Ebenezer Scrooge, wealthy and miserly moneylender living in Victorian London, spends his Christmas Eve being—to mix Christmas metaphors—a total Grinch.

Over the course of the afternoon he refuses a dinner invitation from his nephew, Fred (“I’ll see you in hell first!”), turns out a pair of volunteers seeking charitable donations for the starving poor (“They had better die and decrease the surplus population!”), threatens to beat a young boy singing Christmas Carols outside his window with a ruler, and, throughout the whole affair, relentlessly abuses his single employee, clerk Bob Cratchit.

Later that night, on an errand of warning, Scrooge’s former partner Marley, deceased these seven years, visits him in ghostly form. Marley gives Scrooge a grim prognosis: unless you change your ways, you are as cooked as a Christmas turkey. And, as if one spectral warning wasn’t enough, Marley sics on Scrooge three more spirits: the Ghost of Christmas Past, the Ghost of Christmas Present, and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.

“Couldn’t I take ‘em all at once and have it over, Jacob?” queries Scrooge.

No such luck: each ghost visits in turn and conducts a critical review of Scrooge’s life, and the lives of those around him, but only during Christmastime. (If Scrooge ever had any Important Moral Lessons during the summer, the spirits didn’t think it necessary to include it in the tour). We conclude with the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come showing Scrooge his own lonely grave, a sight which is too much for poor old Scrooge.

Scrooge, “holding up his hands in a last prayer to have his fate reversed,” repents of his ways and pledges to honor Christmas throughout the year: “Oh, tell me I may sponge away the writing on this stone!” Frightfully good stuff. He spends Christmas Day undoing all the bad he did the day before: he pays a young boy^[2] handsomely to anonymously deliver an enormous Christmas turkey to poor Bob Cratchit; he finds the two volunteers and pledges some cash; he joins Fred for dinner—and more. God Bless Us, Every One!

Scrooge’s repentance constitutes a sort of massive Bayesian update: at the beginning of the story, Scrooge is a miserable git. Being hated and shunned “was the very thing he liked. To edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance.” But by the end of the story, he becomes “as good a man as the old city knew.”

A Bayesian update is a revision of belief in response to new evidence—and the stronger your prior belief, the stronger the evidence needs to be in order to overturn it. At the beginning of the story, Scrooge is very set in his beliefs, ergo, Scrooge needs some pretty strong evidence to change them.

Most adaptations misinterpret what ends up changing Scrooge’s mind: everyone loves framing Scrooge’s realization in front of his gravestone and delights in pouring haunted house fog into the scene. But… Scrooge isn’t an idiot: the whole affair is launched by a visit from Scrooge’s verifiably dead partner. Scrooge is obviously aware of his own mortality: “I’m going to die, therefore Merry Christmas?” Nonsense.

No, there is something very curious about that gravestone, but since it can’t be the simple fact that Scrooge is going to die, what is it that Scrooge learns from the gravestone at the end of the book?

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A Christmas Carol is fundamentally a story about death, not Christmas.

Dickens begins his book starkly—astute readers may have caught my allusion to it at the beginning of this review.

Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it… There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.

What a way for a Christmas story to begin! Again, most adaptations miss this and open the tale with something less macabre. A Muppet Christmas Carol gets the gold here; the Muppets engage in some light banter as the opening credits play, but Gonzo faithfully delivers the line with only the most minor of tweaks to accommodate Statler and Waldorf’s dual casting: “The Marleys were dead: to begin with.”

The story revolves around that opening line. Death is at the heart of A Christmas Carol. Scrooge is surrounded by it. His partner, Marley, dies seven years before the haunting on Christmas Eve. His sister, Fan, dies young, leaving her child, Scrooge’s nephew Fred, behind. Tiny Tim, the son of Scrooge’s clerk Bob Cratchit, is crippled and destined for an early death. And death, of course, is the main focus of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, as its vision includes both Tiny Tim’s untimely end and Scrooge’s quite timely one.

Let us examine the first death in the story: Marley’s.

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When Marley appears to Scrooge in his house on Christmas Eve, in addition to being translucent (and, uh, dead), he is wrapped in chains “of cashboxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel.” These chains, Marley mournfully tells Scrooge, are the chains he forged in life. “I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.”

My family and I have debated Marley’s spiritual destination over great quantities of mulled wine. Some insist he’s in Purgatory, as only a soul in the process of reconciliation with God would have the capacity to repent, as Marley does: “No space of regret can make amends for one life’s opportunity misused! Yet such was I! Oh! such was I!”

As for me, my money is on Marley being in Hell^[3]:

There was something very awful, too, in the spectre’s being provided with an infernal atmosphere of its own. Scrooge could not feel it himself, but this was clearly the case; for though the Ghost sat perfectly motionless, its hair, and skirts, and tassels, were still agitated as by the hot vapour from an oven.

Regardless of whether those are the fires of damnation or of purging, while their conversation is full of the possibility of repentance for Scrooge, neither Scrooge nor Marley bring up the possibility of redemption for Marley. “I have [no comfort] to give,” Marley tells Scrooge. “It comes from other regions, Ebenezer Scrooge, and is conveyed by other ministers to other kinds of men.”

Marley proceeds to explain to Scrooge that his damnation, or at the very least his suffering, is due to his neglect of his fellow man in life. And that Scrooge is well on the way to having it even worse, unless he changes his ways. To facilitate this repentance, Scrooge will be visited by the three ghosts of Christmas Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas Yet to Come.

Post warning, as Marley rejoins the ghostly parade outside, Scrooge observes “one old ghost, in a white waistcoat, with a monstrous iron safe attached to its ankle, who cried piteously at being unable to assist a wretched woman with an infant, whom it saw below, upon a doorstep. The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power for ever.”

Dickens never explains this contradiction: if these souls are not able to intercede for the living, what is the mechanism by which Marley is allowed, on Christmas Eve, to interfere in Scrooge’s fate? Why are the other deceased out of luck? Don’t they have friends who are alive and in need of correction?

“Nor can I tell you what I would. A very little more is all permitted to me,” Marley tells Scrooge shortly before departing, tantalizingly using the passive voice. “How it is that I appear before you in a shape that you can see, I may not tell… I am here to-night to warn you, that you have yet a chance and hope of escaping my fate. A chance and hope of my procuring, Ebenezer.”

Dickens may keep this secret, but if we allow ourselves to play Ghost of Christmas Past for Marley, I do think there’s a glimmer of an explanation. For while Marley decries all his missed opportunities to walk among his fellow man, there is one small soul who Marley did touch in life: Scrooge.

C. S. Lewis, writing deliciously as the devil Screwtape in The Screwtape Letters, gives this advice to his incompetent nephew Wormwood:

Pray do not fill your letters with rubbish about this European War.... I am not in the least interested in knowing how many people in England have been killed by bombs. In what state of mind they died, I can learn from the office at this end. That they were going to die sometime, I knew already.

A Christmas Carol takes a similar attitude. Death is inevitable—but, rather than the “state of mind” of the deceased, Carol focuses on the state of the world that the deceased leaves behind.

Marley’s impact on the world is not large… but it isn’t zero either. The introduction treats Scrooge’s mourning as a gag: “And even Scrooge was not so dreadfully cut up by the sad event, but that he was an excellent man of business on the very day of the funeral, and solemnised it with an undoubted bargain.” A later passage gives us a deeper glimpse.

The Ghost of Christmas Past takes Scrooge to visit his old fiancée, Belle, now married with children. Scrooge is struck by the happiness of the house and the implication that this love and tenderness might have been “a spring-time in the haggard winter of his life”. But the Ghost chose a very particular night to show him: the night of Marley’s Death.

“Belle,” said the husband, turning to his wife with a smile, “I saw an old friend of yours this afternoon.”

“Who was it?”

“Guess!”

“How can I? Tut, don’t I know?” she added in the same breath, laughing as he laughed. “Mr. Scrooge.”

“Mr. Scrooge it was. I passed his office window; and as it was not shut up, and he had a candle inside, I could scarcely help seeing him. His partner lies upon the point of death, I hear; and there he sat alone. Quite alone in the world, I do believe.”

“Spirit!” said Scrooge in a broken voice, “remove me from this place.”

In my interpretation of this passage, it is not the vision of a fruitful happy marriage, lost forever, that breaks Scrooge—although I’m sure it is a contributing factor. Scrooge is finally broken upon being confronted by that final night of Marley’s life; the night in which his last and, by that point, only friend died. From that night on, Scrooge is alone. And, by the time we meet Scrooge at the beginning of this story, Scrooge’s self-isolation is complete:

“Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with gladsome looks, “My dear Scrooge, how are you? When will you come to see me?” No beggars implored him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him what it was o’clock, no man or woman ever once in all his life inquired the way to such and such a place, of Scrooge.”

If Marley has earned, somehow, one brief opportunity to intervene for good in human affairs—something he longs for as a ghost despite taking little opportunity to in life—I fancy that he has earned it through his trace of companionship with Scrooge. “You were always a good friend to me,” Scrooge tells Marley before he departs, never to be seen again. If we re-examine Marley’s track record, we find it a low bar to clear: one person, upon death, mourns. But it’s enough.

Sic transit Marley. Alright, Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, does Scrooge’s death manage to clear this bar?

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Quite early on the ghostly tour, thanks to the hard work of the Ghosts of Christmas Past and Present, the gears have already started to turn for Scrooge. When shown a vision of his own lonely boyhood, Scrooge has regrets: “There was a boy singing a Christmas Carol at my door last night. I should have liked to have given him something: that’s all.” When shown a vision of a joyful Christmas party thrown by his former employer (when Scrooge was very early in his career), he expresses regret again: “I should like to be able to say a word or two to my clerk just now. That’s all.”

Scrooge is therefore in a receptive state of mind when the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come appears:

‘Ghost of the Future!’ he exclaimed, ‘I fear you more than any spectre I have seen. But as I know your purpose is to do me good, and as I hope to live to be another man from what I was, I am prepared to bear you company, and do it with a thankful heart.’

The ghost takes Scrooge into the future and first chooses to show Scrooge a conversation between some businessmen. They’re discussing a recent death, one that isn’t likely to have any mourners of any kind—unless lunch is provided, in which case they’d consider it. One businessman concludes, “I’ll offer to go, if anyone else will. When I come to think of it, I’m not at all sure that I wasn’t [the deceased’s] most particular friend; for we used to stop and speak whenever we met.”^[4]

The scene perplexes Scrooge somewhat, as he can’t imagine who they could be referring to. Not Marley, surely, as he’s been dead for years. Scrooge then looks around trying to find his future self:

He looked about in that very place for his own image; but another man stood in his accustomed corner, and though the clock pointed to his usual time of day for being there, he saw no likeness of himself among the multitudes that poured in through the Porch. It gave him little surprise, however; for he had been revolving in his mind a change of life, and thought and hoped he saw his new-born resolutions carried out in this.

Scrooge’s optimism is endearing here: when presented with evidence of his business acquaintances discussing, without a trace of sorrow, someone’s recent passing and the evidence of him not being in his usual spot, his preferred conclusion is, “Of course I’m not where I usually am! I’ve changed my ways! I guess this little night of reflection worked!”

But, as they say, absence of evidence is evidence of absence… and evidence of future Scrooge continues to be conspicuously absent.

The ghost’s next vignette is of a horde of scavengers, pawning the mystery dead man’s belongings for a few coins. After all, it isn’t as if the dead man has any use for them. “If he wanted to keep [these things] after he was dead, a wicked old screw, why wasn’t he natural in his lifetime? If he had been, he’d have somebody to look after him when he was struck with Death, instead of lying gasping out his last there, alone by himself.” “It’s a judgment on him,” agrees another of the thieves.

Scrooge still doesn’t get it: “Spirit! I see, I see. The case of this unhappy man might be my own. My life tends that way, now.”

The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, trying to be helpful, shows Scrooge the literal body next (head covered, can’t make it too easy), and the scene contains some of the best writing in the book:

Oh cold, cold, rigid, dreadful Death, set up thine altar here, and dress it with such terrors as thou hast at thy command: for this is thy dominion! But of the loved, revered, and honoured head, thou canst not turn one hair to thy dread purposes, or make one feature odious. It is not that the hand is heavy and will fall down when released; it is not that the heart and pulse are still; but that the hand WAS open, generous, and true; the heart brave, warm, and tender; and the pulse a man’s. Strike, Shadow, strike! And see his good deeds springing from the wound, to sow the world with life immortal!

But Scrooge understands that, given the evidence thus far, the man on the slab in front of him might have no such good deeds to sow. This body has no one mourning him, no one who remembers them with kindness, no one, apparently, who even receives an inheritance. Maybe the body will do some good for the hungry rats beneath the hearth-stone. That’s one thing, Scrooge supposes.

You know what Scrooge doesn’t suppose, yet? The identity of this body.

Scrooge objects: surely someone expressed some emotion at this death! Surely this death pulled at some heart-strings! The Ghost concedes the point and takes Scrooge to a young couple celebrating: they were in debt to the deceased and the circumstances have given them leniency in the remittance of it. “Their hearts were lighter. The children’s faces, hushed and clustered round to hear what they so little understood, were brighter; and it was a happier house for this man’s death! The only emotion that the Ghost could show him, caused by the event, was one of pleasure.”

Scrooge changes the subject and asks the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come to show him a death—any death—that’s connected with some tenderness. The spirit obliges and takes Scrooge to the death of Tiny Tim.

The scene is tragic yet heartwarming: the family comes together in a way they haven’t needed to before. Scrooge sees not just the love of the Cratchit family that Tim leaves behind, Scrooge sees Tim’s “good deeds springing from the wound” before his eyes. Tim’s death causes Fred to stop Bob Cratchit in the street and offer his assistance in supporting their family. The kids resolve to not quarrel as often, in memory of Tim’s patience and mildness.

In case you thought that Scrooge had put the pieces together by this point—you’re wrong. “Spectre,” said Scrooge, “something informs me that our parting moment is at hand. I know it, but I know not how. Tell me what man that was whom we saw lying dead?”

The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come finally brings Scrooge to the churchyard. As it does, Scrooge begs a point of clarification: “Are these the shadows of things that Will be, or are they the shadows of things that May be, only?”

The Ghost doesn’t answer, but resolutely points Scrooge to the gravestone: EBENEZER SCROOGE.

“Am I that man who lay upon the bed?” [Scrooge] cried, upon his knees.
The finger pointed from the grave to him, and back again.
“No, Spirit! Oh no, no!”
The finger still was there.
“Spirit!” he cried, tight clutching at its robe, “hear me! I am not the man I was. I will not be the man I must have been but for this intercourse. Why show me this, if I am past all hope!”

Here, at last, Scrooge sees the evidence presented thus far in the correct light. He asks not, “am I the man in that grave?” but “am I the man who lay upon the bed?” Scrooge always knew he was going to die: he didn’t know that he was going to die like this.

The book doesn’t necessarily show what Scrooge anticipated for his death, but the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come paints a picture of utter fruitlessness. Scrooge attended his partner Marley’s funeral; none of Scrooge’s business acquaintances plan to attend his. Marley’s death left at least Scrooge broken; the emotions circling Scrooge’s death are relief, indifference, or scorn.

Notably, Fred, Scrooge’s nephew, features in the end for Tiny Tim—but not for Scrooge. This is surprising, as Scrooge sees Fred pledge to invite him to Christmas Dinner every year, as showcased in a vision by the Ghost of Christmas Present:

If he finds me going there, in good temper, year after year, and saying, "Uncle Scrooge, how are you?" If it only put him in the vein to leave his poor clerk fifty pounds, that's something.

This future Scrooge never joins Fred for dinner. And, from the visions bestowed by Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, no inheritance is divested to either Cratchit or Fred. There is no indication that Fred attends the funeral.

This is the new information that causes Scrooge’s Bayesian update into honoring Christmas and his fellow man: not that Scrooge will die, but that he will die unmourned, leaving absolutely nothing to the world and to those around him.^[5] To put it bluntly: at least Scrooge felt sad when Marley died; no one does when Scrooge dies. Marley’s floor was one; Scrooge doesn’t even manage to match it.

It’s worth noting the epistemological technique that the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come has been carefully leveraging. If Scrooge connects the dots too soon, he’s liable to engage in motivated reasoning, viewing every new piece of evidence through his existing self-conception. By hiding the body’s identity, the ghost allows Scrooge to draw his own conclusions about the barrenness of the death from the evidence provided—conclusions which get applied to himself only when he sees the writing on the stone.

This is what most adaptations miss: they frame the graveyard scene as the moment when Scrooge comes to terms with his own mortality. The gravestone isn’t important! In Scrooge’s moment of revelation, it is simply an equals sign that forces him to re-contextualize what he has been shown: on one side of the equation is Scrooge’s own person; the other side is the host of lonely and damning moments that the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come has carefully assembled.

The ghost’s “enormous accumulation of small but unanimous facts”^[6] tip the scale. Scrooge Changes His Mind. He cannot continue his life on his current course to this end. He must find a way to give back to the world and to his fellow man; he must find a way for his death to more closely resemble Tiny Tim’s. His must be a death that “sows the world with life immortal.”

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If A Christmas Carol doesn’t begin with “once upon a time”, neither does it end with “happily ever after.” Scrooge still dies—maybe not at the literal conclusion of the book, but the trajectory is understood by all. The narrator’s closing description of Scrooge could have been straight out of a eulogy: “it was always said of him that he knew how to keep Christmas well”.

But, as we have seen, what Scrooge learns from his haunting is not to avoid death but to live the remainder of his life in such a way as to leave a mark. And A Christmas Carol is particular about the kind of mark you must leave.

The popular framing of the story focuses on Scrooge’s miserly nature, but A Christmas Carol does not damn Scrooge for not maximizing charitable giving. One gets the impression that if Scrooge had donated adequately to the philanthropists all those years with no other changes, still wishing that the idiots on Christmas would be “boiled with [their] own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through [their] heart”, he would nevertheless get a visit from Marley and the three ghosts on Christmas Eve.

We might say that charitable giving is necessary but not sufficient. In the final stave, Scrooge does donate to the philanthropists and includes “a great many back-payments” into the gift. He’s clearly putting his considerable wealth to use for the sake of the general populace. But Dickens spends much more time on Scrooge’s reconciliation with his nephew and his new partnership with Bob Cratchit: the people in his life who he can most affect with his time and companionship.

I said earlier that The Muppet Christmas Carol was not my favorite retelling, for that honor belongs to a stage adaptation done by Colleen Madden.^[7] Her version thoroughly understands this lesson of the tale and focuses on the neighbor that Scrooge affects the most through his transformation: Tiny Tim.

The play opens on a cheery Christmas scene: children are playing around an enormous tree; adults are singing carols. Only the host seems rather put-out and melancholy. As the festivities continue, the kids start begging for the traditional Christmas story and they select the host of the event to be the storyteller. The host apologizes: he doesn’t think he has the stomach for it this year.

A friend of the host is cajoled into telling the story and, after sitting in the chair of honor, he begins the tale with a boisterous, “Once upon a time,” which finally snaps the host out of his reverie and he halts the whole project. “This story does possess a ‘once upon a time’,” the host concedes, “But this story does not begin with ‘once upon a time.’ Not this story, not ever.” The host takes his seat in the chair. “MARLEY WAS DEAD,” he intones. “To begin with.”

And we are transported back to the foggy cobblestones of Christmas Eve of Victorian London.

Madden preserves much of Dickens’ original language and the host narrates the story faithfully and beautifully. But as the story comes to its conclusion, Madden brings the audience into the secret of her framing device: the host is Tiny Tim, now an adult, grown up and healed by Scrooge’s generosity and friendship. This is not Tim’s party. This is Scrooge’s party, the first Christmas party since Scrooge’s death, and it is filled with his friends, family, and loved ones who all remember him and honor Christmas.

The framing device, while simple, would be saccharine in the hands of a less skilled adapter. Madden understands that, just as A Christmas Carol must start with death, it must also end with it. For it is only upon your death when you can see the final culmination of your life. Stephen King writes in Life of Chuck, another excellent tale incorporating foreknowledge of death, that the main character’s life contains “small income, large disbursements.” By returning your modest gifts to your community, you multiply them a hundredfold. After death, like Marley and his fellow dead, you are consigned to only watch—and maybe regret. You must make your hay while the sun shines.^[8]

Scrooge gives Tiny Tim health and a full life but the gift that Madden’s adaptation focuses on is the same quality that Dickens imparts upon us in the final lines of the book: “he knew how to keep Christmas well.” Notably, this is not a gift that charitable giving could impart: this is a gift that is only possible through the investment of a personal relationship.

Why Christmas? Fred, Scrooge’s nephew, explains why in Stave 1:

[Christmas is] 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.

We're all going to the same end: death.^[9] Scrooge's transformation is not from miser to philanthropist: it is from a man who refuses to acknowledge his fellow travelers to one who journeys alongside them in true fellowship.

We can all be like Charlie Brown and lament the commercialization of Christmas, but Fred’s belief was true in 1843 and I still believe it’s true now. Christmas means something and deserves to be honored for all the ways that it helps us re-kindle our disposition to “sow the world with life immortal” while we still have that life in us. And, if you are looking for ways to keep Christmas well, I recommend you add reading this tale to your list. Like Scrooge, you may learn something.

I give A Christmas Carol five stars.

Someday soon we all will be together
If the fates allow
Until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow
So have yourself a merry little Christmas now