The North Carolina Shakespeare Festival
Outreach Education Department
A Guide to the Study of A Christmas Carol
By Charles Dickens First Published in England December 19, 1843
Charles Dickens circa 1844 I have endeavoured in this Ghostly little book to raise the Ghost of an Idea which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their house pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it. Their faithful Friend and Servant, C. D. TABLE OF CONTENTS (to go immediately to the page, just click on the topic)
The Life of Charles Dickens A Brief History of A Christmas Carol
England in the 19th Century
Christmas
Everyday Life
Weather
Work
Money
Coins
Sickness
Social Ills
Poverty
Prisons
Odds and Ends
Literary Notes on Dickens’s “Ghostly Little Book”
Shakespearean Allusions
Personification and Spirits
A Christmas Carol in the Theater
A brief Production History
Notes on NCSF’s Production
Quests and Questions
Sights and Insights
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The Life of Charles Dickens Charles John Huffam Dickens was born
February 17, 1812 in Portsmouth on the southern coast
of England in the house pictured here. At the time of
his death 58 years later on June 9, 1870 near Rochester,
he was arguably the most famous novelist in the world.
His great novels Oliver Twist, Great Expectations,
David Copperfield, Nicholas Nickleby, and Bleak
House vividly evoke the world of 19th century urban
England. He chronicled images of the lower and
working classes at a time when the Industrial
Revolution wrought great changes for those classes.
Many believe that Charles Dickens’s detailed and
finely-observed portrayals of lower-class characters
made those invisible classes visible and was
instrumental in the social reformations that gradually
created, over the course of his life, a more humane
policy toward the poor.
Charles Dickens’s own childhood was marred
by financial uncertainty, and just after his twelfth
birthday, when his father was imprisoned for debt, he
was forced to abandon his education and go to work in
a shoe-blacking factory. John Dickens, Charles’s father, was a civil servant whose family
clung to middle-class pretensions, and the seeming precariousness of his social position
made the 19th Century realities of poverty, debt, and Darwinian economic competition
that much more vivid to his son Charles, who never forgot his 18th-month sojourn in the
world of England’s working poor. The family managed, with difficulty, to calm their
creditors and maintain a slowly deteriorating standard of living. Charles was able to go
to school for two more years, until finally, at the age of 15, straightened circumstances
forced him to leave school and seek permanent employment.
Dickens remembered his childhood as unhappy, but others recall a sensitive but
spirited boy who was fond of theatricals and puppet-plays, who could sing well and who
had an uncanny and humorous ability to imitate people. Although his formal education
was limited, he, by his own admission, read books enthusiastically and applied himself
diligently to acquiring employable skills.
At first Charles Dickens worked as a clerk in a law firm, but he found the job
tedious and aspired to be a press reporter in the House of Commons. So he studied
shorthand. He learned it very quickly and very well, later having a reputation as among
the best shorthand recorders covering Parliament. Before he achieved his goal of
covering the House of Commons for the press, however, he spent some time as a kind of
court reporter in a branch of England’s legal system.
Those of us who have seen on television the proceedings of the British House of
Commons know how rowdy those speeches and debates can, at times, become. Charles
Dickens, at the age of nineteen, was hired to record, in shorthand, transcripts of such
proceedings for one of the periodicals covering Parliament. He was very good at this
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transcription and soon was being sent all over England to record and report on the
speeches politicians gave to their constituencies in the countryside. Charles Dickens,
then, became a skilled and valuable reporter on political affairs in England, and had the
opportunity to observe a wide spectrum of English life from the urban center in London,
out to the countryside and into the newly established industrial areas of the Midlands.
Dickens observed his countrymen in their centers of power and in their everyday
lives and even in their poverty. He saw what was happening to people in the countryside,
and what policies were being pursued in the government. He was in a position to apply
his keen powers of observation to the publication of sketches and stories that vividly
portrayed life in England in the 19th Century. He had yet to find an outlet for those
stories and sketches, however, and he seems to have, very briefly, sought a career in the
theater. He was ill on the day of his first big audition, however, and, although later in life
he participated in amateur theatricals, he never became a full-time performer, and his
talent was saved for the creation of a remarkable body of fiction.
The first of his publications to achieve some notice were brief stories and
descriptions, in a humorous vein, of characters and events he had observed on his
reporter’s beat. Published singly, under the pseudonym “Boz,” these brief pieces became
quite popular, and when a publisher offered to pay Dickens to publish them in a collected
volume, Dickens agreed. Sketches by Boz was a great success, and soon Dickens was
being commissioned to write the serialized novels that made him famous.
Charles Dickens’s novels were written and published in installments over the
course of several months. Dickens was contracted to be paid by the installment, and
there was a carefuly designed formula as to the length, timing, and number of the
episodes. Dickens, was not, therefore, paid by the word, but by the installment, and the
length of his novels reflects that they were serials before they were published as single
books. A Christmas Carol is a notable exception.
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A Brief History of A Christmas Carol Between February 1836, when Sketches by Boz
appeared in print, and December 1843 when A Christmas
Carol was published, Dickens wrote and produced two
plays, and published The Pickwick Papers, and his first
great novels Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby. He also
published three of his lesser-known novels: Old Curiosity
Shop, Barnaby Rudge, and the first installments of Martin
Chuzzlewit. He spent the first half of 1842, and his thirtieth
birthday, in America and published in October of that year a
not always flattering account of the United States which
included a severe condemnation of slavery. He had become
the most famous novelist in the world.
Then, a year later, on October 7, 1843, Charles
Dickens addressed the Manchester Athenaeum, an organization that provided educational
and recreational facilities for laboring men and women in this heavily industrialized, and
rapidly growing city in the north of England. The organization was short of funds and
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Dickens agreed to speak to raise money. His interest in educational reform and the
reform of government policies toward the poor had been apparent in Nicholas Nickleby
and Oliver Twist, and Dickens had read a government report on the conditions of the
working class earlier that year. He was searching for a way to strike a “sledge hammer
blow” for laboring children. Even though he was very busy with the continuing
installments of Martin Chuzzlewit, a novel that, due to its more pessimistic portrayal of
the human condition, was losing Dickens’s audience, the faces in the crowd in
Manchester inspired him to finally swing his sledge hammer.
It took him about six weeks to compose the story of a miser and his Christmas
nightmares. He came to an agreement to publish the book only on commission (that is,
Dickens would be paid only out of the profits, if any, the book earned), and on December
19, 1843 A Christmas Carol was on the shelves. It was a small book, but it was a book,
not an installment in a periodical, and Dickens oversaw its design. It was bound in red
cloth, had gilt-edged pages and a gilt design on the cover. Eight illustrations by John
Leech (half of them in full color) were in the book, and it sold for five shillings (one third
of Bob Cratchit’s weekly salary).
The initial printing of 6000
copies sold out and 2000 more copies
were being printed by January 6, the
traditional “Twelfth Day of Christmas.”
A cheap knock-off of the book, “A
Christmas Ghost Story,” had already
appeared in print, and Dickens sued the
publishers. By February, no fewer than
eight dramatic adaptations of the book
were being performed in the theaters.
Dickens did not oppose these first play
versions of his story. Apparently he
realized that the book was priced more
for a middle-class readership, but that the
more affordable plays made the story available to the working class. A Christmas Carol
was a phenomenon.
Since its first publication, the story has been adapted into plays, made into
movies, presented as radio drama, and given in live dramatic readings. The first to give
these dramatic readings of the story was Charles Dickens himself, a very popular speaker
in his day, and he read his own adaptations of A Christmas Carol for many years. His
rendition included character voices and gestures, and a kind a finger-puppet
demonstration of Fezziwig’s dancing.
To account for this amazing popularity, we must first place the story in its
historical context.
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England in the 19th Century The narrator of A Christmas Carol says
at one point: I am standing in the spirit at your
elbow. And indeed, Dickens shared with his
mid-nineteenth-century readers an intimacy
that makes his story very vivid. But that very
intimacy with his contemporaries separates
Dickens from us, for their world was very
different from ours.
The Old Christmas Traditions and the
New Industrial Cities
Christmas, it seems, has always been seen as traditional, as a time of repeating old
rituals and marking the passage of time by remembering enactments of the rituals in
earlier years. Charles Dickens was only a generation or two removed from an old and
elaborate set of Christmas Traditions which, in the face of profound changes in the way
people lived in England, were fading away. For Dickens, Christmas, traditionally, was a
festival centered on the old feudal way of life. In the old days, when knights and lords
ruled large manors, a midwinter festival of great antiquity (dating from an age even
before the arrival of Christianity in England) was celebrated in the castles and large
houses of the countryside. The entire manorial community would gather to eat, drink,
dance, and generally revel. Often, a Feast of Fools would be held, and one of the lowest
members of the hierarchy would be crowned Lord of Manor for a day, and the strict class
structure of feudal society would be ritually turned upside down. The Poor would be
Rich for a brief time.
We have a vague memory of these
festivals in our idea of “The Twelve Days of
Christmas,” for in the old ritual Christmas
was a season, not just a day, and the festival
lasted from December 25 to January 6, the
traditional day of Epiphany, when the Christ
Child was revealed to the world in the
persons of the Magi. Shakespeare’s play
Twelfth Night is a reference to these old
traditions. The Lord of the Manor would
bestow gifts on his subjects in honor of the
season, and the entire community would reconfirm the ties that made it as
interdependent as any family.
As people began leaving the old estates to seek work in the new factories of the
late 18th and early 19th centuries, the old Christmas traditions had long been fading away.
A workforce in a factory is not a community of serfs, and the industrialist who owns the
factory is not the Lord of the Manor. The relationships are all different.
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For the first readers of A Christmas Carol, the story established a new vision for
the celebration of Christmas, a new ritual that saved the holiday for the newly established
urban communities of factory workers and middle-class city-dwellers. The first
Christmas card, an emblem of the new rituals of the season, appeared in 1843, the same
year A Christmas Carol was published. The old tradition of the Lord of the Manor
bestowing year-end plenty on his serfs, was replaced with the new tradition of mutual
gift-giving and family gatherings.
A Christmas Carol was a new way to tell the story of Christmas, with religious,
but non-biblical images. At its heart, it is a story of conversion, and if the Spirits in the
story are more emblems than angels, the conversion is as profound as any recounted in
the New Testament. The citizens of Victorian England could see in A Christmas Carol
that their society, too, with it’s upheavals, dislocations, terrible poverty, gross inequities
and Darwinian dog-eat-dog work ethic, was not cut off from the salvation promised in the
Scriptures. Peace and Justice might come to Victorian England, too, one repentant soul
at a time.
The cultural changes experienced by the Victorians are no more intense than those
we are experiencing now, and the appeal of the story has never diminished.
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London Weather
London is between 51 and 52 degrees
north latitude. That makes it about as far
north as Calgary, Alberta in Canada. It is
farther north than Boston, Boise, and
Minneapolis. The Gulf Stream keeps the
British Isles warmer than Minnesota, but it
cannot change the movement of the sun. In
the winter our days in the Northern
Hemisphere get shorter, the shortest day
being around December 21 or 22, right before
Christmas. The farther north you go, the
shorter the days get, and in London, around Christmas time, the sun comes up around
8:00, never gets very high in the sky, and goes down around 4:00 creating something less
than 8 hours of daylight.
There was no electrical illumination in London in the 1840’s, and even gaslights
we still pretty rare. For heat and cooking everyone burned coal, which made the air very
smoky. The Gulf Stream, bringing warm water into the cooler latitudes, can raise dense
fogs in the winter. In the winter, in the mid 19th Century, London was dark almost
around the clock, and candles were the common source of light. It was commonly so
dark, what with the fog and the coal smoke, with the lack of daylight, and the lack of
illumination, that people had to grope with their hands, and boys could make money by
leading horse carriages through the street with torches.
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Next, let’s consider the work people did, starting with Scrooge.
How exactly
does Scrooge make
his money, and how
much, exactly does he
have? There are hints
in the story that the
business concern
known as Scrooge and
Marley was roughly
equivalent to one of
our stock brokerages.
Scrooge, then, makes
his money by
investing in stock issued by companies, and by making loans and collecting the interest.
Charles Dickens had some personal knowledge of how private individuals might secure
loans from those, like Scrooge, with money to lend. Dickens’s own father was nearly
ruined when he had to take out a loan for £200 from one James Milbourne to be paid
back at a rate of £26 per year for life. The symbol “£” is the sign for English money and
is pronounced “Pounds,” the way we pronounce “$” “Dollars.” To imagine the amount of
money involved, it helps to know that John Dickens was, at the time, paying £22 per year
in rent, and earning about £350 per year in salary. The borrowed amount, therefore, was
equivalent to about 7-months salary, a significant sum. The terms for repayment
reflected the risk that Mr. Dickens’s creditor assumed. In the event, John Dickens was
not able to repay his debt, and four and half years after taking out the loan he was sent to
Debtor’s Prison (back to Money).
For Scrooge to have enough capital to make these kinds of loans and to invest in
companies on the London Stock Exchange, he would need to be very rich indeed,
although Dickens is careful not to reveal the exact extent of Scrooge’s wealth. It would
seem that Dickens wants to allow us to imagine whatever fantastic sum we dare, and not
discourage us from applying it to Scrooge.
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What about Bob Cratchit’s Job?
A concern like Scrooge and Marley would generate a significant amount of paper
work what with loan contracts, stock transactions, and the like, and it is Bob Cratchit’s
job as clerk of the establishment to generate, copy, file, and manage all these documents.
The modern personal computer has revolutionized this type of work, and we must
imagine Bob doing all the work of modern office software: Documents, Spreadsheets,
Accounting, filing, copying, etc., with a quill pen, a bottle of ink and a supply of paper.
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Why is Martha so late for Christmas Dinner at the Cratchits?
It’s because she had to have a job to help the
family pay the bills. We have some idea what Martha’s
job may have been like because reports by parliamentary
commissioners on the plight of women and children in
mines and factories appeared in 1842 and 1843. We
know that in the weeks before he wrote A Christmas
Carol Charles Dickens read the 1843 report. The reports
were shocking. Dickens was shocked.
After reading the second report of the Children’s
Employment Commission, published under a blue cover,
he wrote to one of the commissioners, Dr. Thomas
Southwood Smith:
I am so perfectly stricken down by the blue book you
have sent me, that I think (as soon as I shall have
done my month’s work) of writing, and bringing out,
a very cheap pamphlet, called ‘An appeal to the
People of England, on behalf of the Poor Man’s Child.
His “month’s worth of writing” was the
contracted installment of Martin Chuzzlewit. Before
Dickens could write his “very cheap pamphlet,” he had
occasion, as we know, to address a crowd of laborers in
Manchester, and on the way back to London, he had
changed his mind about the pamphlet. He wrote again to
Dr. Smith, this time writing that he had reasons
[She] has been an apprentice as a
milliner 2 years and three-quarters; is
boarded and lodged . . . There are two
busy seasons; one beginning in October
and ending about Christmas; the
second begins about April or Easter,
and ends at the latter part of July. In
the winter season begins to work halfpast 7 A.M., and leaves off about
11P.M., if they are not very busy;
occasionally goes on till 12, not later.
In the summer begins at half-past 6
A.M., and leaves off about 1 in the
morning; “has sat up till 2 or 3.” Has
never worked all night. Generally the
work is finished earlier on Saturdays
than on other nights, being about 10 in
the busy season. Does not begin earlier
on Mondays. Never works on Sunday;
goes to church regularly. In the winter
busy season has breakfast at 7 A.M.,
for which a quarter of an hour is
allowed; dinner at half-past 12, for
which there is no limited time,
generally about a quarter of an hour;
tea at 6, a quarter of an hour allowed;
supper at 10, for which there is a
quarter of an hour or twenty minutes. .
.. If they sit up till 1 or 2 in the
morning a cup of coffee is allowed, but
nothing to eat. . . . When she has sat
up a long time has pain in the back,
and the legs ache; has had swelling of
the feet. The work does not try her
eyes. Is rather round-shouldered; this
is not uncommon. Had very good
health before she came here, but since
has been several times ill: has a cough
every winter. . . . One or two of the
young women have fainted when they
have gone up to bed or to tea. Two of
the dressmakers wear spectacles: they
are 18 or 20 years of age. Has as much
food as she likes.
. . . for deferring the production of that pamphlet until
the end of the year. I am not at liberty to explain
them further, just now; but rest assured that when you
know them, and see what I do, and where, and how,
you will certainly feel that a Sledge hammer has come
down with twenty times the force—twenty thousand
times the force—I could exert by following my first
idea.
Dickens’s new idea was, of course, A Christmas
Carol, and it certainly came down on the conscience of
the people with a sledgehammer’s force.
To the right is an excerpt from that second report
of the Children’s Employment Commission, the “blue book” that struck Dickens so hard.
These are notes from an interview of Emily Pennington, a sixteen-year-old milliner’s
apprentice, a young woman whose experience may have inspired Dickens’s image of
Martha Cratchit.
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How did English money work in the 19th Century?
In a story about wealth, greed, and generosity one would expect several allusions
to money. A Christmas Carol does not disappoint, and here we provide guidance in
understanding the money that Scrooge, Cratchit, and their contemporaries earned, spent,
hoarded, and gave away.
Let’s start with Bob Cratchit’s salary. Scrooge reports that Bob is paid 15
shillings a week for his work as a clerk for Scrooge and Marley. Exactly what is a
shilling and exactly how much money is it?
It is helpful first to understand the basic unit of currency, that is, the unit from
which all other denominations of money is derived by either multiplying the unit or
dividing it. You can see that in our system, the dollar is the unit and we have “quarters,”
for example, which are worth a “quarter of a dollar,” and we have bills that denominate
multiples of dollars.
In 19th Century England the unit of currency was the Pound, and English money
is indicated by the symbol “ £ “. This symbol is a kind of “L” and is derived from the
Latin word libra, meaning “scales” (think of the astrological sign “Libra”), just like our
abbreviation “lb.” At this point we must emphasize that our Dollar is not equivalent in
value to the English Pound, neither in the 19th Century, nor currently. On the other hand,
the Pound operated as the unit upon which all other coinage and currency was based, just
like the Dollar does for us.
Now Bob Cratchit, as we have seen, was paid 15 shillings a week. It took, in 19th
Century England, 20 shillings to equal a pound. Since annual incomes at the time
would have been expressed as Pounds, it is convenient to think of Bob’s salary as £39 a
year, or a little over £3 a month.
Parenthetically, the slang term for
“shilling” at the time of the story
was “bob,” and, in the story,
Dickens puns Bob’s name with his
“15 bob” per week salary.
Now we can try to figure
out exactly how much this amount
of money might have been worth.
It is futile to try to “convert” 19th
Century English money into 21st
Century American money. Instead,
let’s try to imagine how much money Bob Cratchit had to spend to provide the
necessities of life for his family, then we will have an idea of how tight the Cratchit
budget must have been.
We know that Charles Dickens’s father was earning about £350 a year in 1819
when he was imprisoned for debt (see above). At this time, John Dickens was paying £22
per year just in rent on the family home in Camden Town, the very part of London where
Bob Cratchit is imagined to be living. The Dickens residence in Camden Town was
probably less than ten years old when the Dickenses moved there in 1822. Twenty years
later it was somewhat shabbier (though the Dickenses had long moved on), and if Charles
Dickens was remembering his house in Camden Town when he imagined the Cratchit
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home, he would have been remembering a place now somewhat more rundown. Perhaps
Bob would not have paid £22 per year in rent, but even if he paid only £18 or £20, the
vast majority of his income would have been eaten up in just providing housing for his
family. We must imagine, therefore, that the Cratchit family was barely making ends
meet on Bob’s salary.
To venture a modern analogy, we suggest that you imagine the Cratchits renting a
three-bedroom townhouse in one of the working class neighborhoods of Queens, one of
the boroughs of New York City. Rent for such a home might be around $1500 a month.
Doing the math, we might imagine Bob Cratchit making a salary working for a small
business concern of about $30,000-$35,000 per year. The official poverty line in the
United States in 2005 for a family of eight (the size of the Cratchit family in the story) is
$32,390. As we have seen, however, Bob’s was not the only income in the household.
Martha was working and contributing to the family income and Peter was nearly old
enough to seek a “situation,” or job, and he, like Charles Dickens, would have
contributed his salary to help pay the family bills. The Cratchits, then, are not the poorest
of the poor, and in London in 1843 the plight of the very poor was dire indeed, but the
Cratchits were far from rich.
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What did the English call their coins?
Some other coins are mentioned in the story. A crown is a coin equivalent to 5
shillings. The half-crown, therefore is equivalent to 2 ½ shillings, a day’s wages for
Bob, and an extravagant tip for the boy running to get the Christmas Turkey.
Twelve pence made a shilling, and there were coins equivalent to 6 pence,
“sixpence,” to 4 pence, a “groat,” 3 pence, “threepence” (pronounced “thruppence”), 2
pence, “twopence” (pronounced “tuppence), 1 pence, “penny”, and fractions of pence:
the “halfpenny” (pronounced “ha’pence), the farthing (one fourth of a pence), and the
half farthing (one eighth of a pence). Farthings, therefore, were coins worth very little
and when Scrooge says “Not a farthing less,” he means that his contribution to the
Philanthropists should not be reduced in the least.
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What afflicts Tiny Tim?
Perhaps the most profound difference between life
in the 19th Century, and life in our day is our fundamentally
different experience of disease. In 1843 it still was not
known that germs cause disease, and, therefore, there were
few vaccines, no antibiotics, no antiseptics. Children died
at an alarming rate from diseases that we have conquered
with vaccines. One of the most terrifying childhood
diseases is Polio. A vaccine for Polio was not developed
until the 1950’s. There are people alive today who
remember the Polio epidemics in this country, and many
who actually contracted the disease and survived.
President Franklin Roosevelt’s legs were paralyzed by
Polio. Polio, a viral infection, causes an acute fever that
paralyzes its victims. Often the paralysis is temporary, or
even partial, but the paralysis can be permanent and so extensive as to make the victim
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unable to breathe. Tiny Tim is described in the novel as having his legs in metal braces.
It is conceivable that Dickens imagined Tiny Tim as a victim of Polio with a paralysis of
his legs.
Because the paralysis of Polio was sometimes reversed, we are invited to believe
that proper medical care might improve Tiny Tim’s condition, whereas neglect would
allow the condition to worsen. If Scrooge would intervene in Tiny Tim’s life, he might
be able to save him, which is, in fact, what Dickens suggests.
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What were some of the social problems that Dickens was trying to address?
When the Philanthropists visit Scrooge to ask for support of their program to
provide for the poor during the holidays, Scrooge asks sarcastically,
Are there no prisons? . . . And the Union Workhouses, are they still in
operation?
And when the Philanthropists answer in the affirmative, Scrooge continues:
The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigor, then?
To which the Philanthropists reply:
Both very busy, sir.
So what exactly are the Treadmill and the Poor Law? What are Union Workhouses?
No one could accuse the English of the 19th Century of not trying. Poverty is a
perennial problem and that the Government felt an obligation to address the problem is
saying a lot. From our later point of view, however, the public policy toward the poor in
Britain in the 19th Century was at best woefully inadequate and at worst cruel and callous.
Traditionally, local churches were responsible for caring for the poor in any
district, and as long as most of the population never strayed from their birthplace the
system seemed to work. Everyone paid a local tax to the parish to defray the cost of
caring for the poor. However, when agricultural practice began to remove peasants from
their connection to the land and they began migrating out of their home districts to seek
work in the new factories, many places near the new industry were overrun with poor
people seeking work. The old system of caring for the poor began to break down.
Victorians had a strong predisposition to think of poverty as the result of laziness.
All programs for the relief of the poor, therefore, had in them an element of work-forbenefits. Workhouses were established where the poor were sent to do menial labor to
defray the cost of their relief.
In 1834 an attempt was made to address the problem on a national level by act of
Parliament. Under the New Poor Law, local taxpayers now elected guardians whose job
it was to manage the funds for the care of the poor and run the workhouses. Several local
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boards would cooperate in running a single workhouse, hence these were called “Union
Workhouses,” and they were technically managed by a central commission in London.
In order to encourage the poor to seek employment in the private sector, the workhouses
were made as grim as possible. Children were often separated from their parents. The
food was poor. If you died in the workhouse, your last rites were brief and shabby. You
had to abandon all your personal possessions to be eligible for the workhouse. The
workhouses were, in fact, a kind of prison. It is no wonder that, as one of the
Philanthropists remarks, when it comes to the Workhouse,
Many can’t go there, and many would rather die.
New Gate Prison in London in the 1800’s
The penal system in 19th Century
Britain was often called “The Treadmill”
because condemnation to punitive labor often
meant actual time working a treadmill. This
was a device in the shape of a large cylinder
turned by persons walking on steps arranged
around the outside and spaced far enough
apart that the prisoners had to reach high for
the next step or be thrown from the machine.
The effort was pointless, boring, and
strenuous enough to wear down even healthy
people. Sometimes prisoners had to work the treadmill for six hours at a time. The
practice was abolished in 1868, but was indeed in full vigor in 1843.
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Odds and Ends
Some items from the 19th Century are now obsolete and we need to be reminded
of what they were.
A Lumber Room is a place to store belongings that aren’t being used. Today
many people use their garage or attic as a lumber room. In the 19th century, an “attic”
was actually a room that people lived in.
When Scrooge says “I’ll retire to Bedlam,” he means that all the Christmas
reveling will drive him crazy. “Bedlam” is a worn down way of saying “Bethlehem.”
The hospital (if you can call it that) for insane persons in London was formally known as
“The Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem.”
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The all important Pudding that Mrs. Cratchit makes is not what we would call
“pudding,” but more like a sausage with raisins in it. It came wrapped in a cloth and was
steamed or boiled before being served.
The Christmas Goose would probably
have been bought as part of a subscription
whereby the Cratchits paid a little every month to
reserve a holiday goose. Then when the goose
was delivered from the poulterer, the Cratchits
would have had to take it to the Baker’s to rent his
oven to roast it. Few people of the Cratchit’s
income level had ovens in their houses, so they
would use the Baker’s oven on Sundays and
holidays (when the Baker was required by law to
bake no bread). Often this was their only
substantial meal of the week. Even today we
retain the notion of “Sunday Dinner” as a
particularly special meal. In Dickens’s day there
was some grumbling from the more conservative
clergy to forbid even this use of the Baker’s ovens on Sabbaths and holidays. Dickens
harshly criticizes this idea in A Christmas Carol when he has Scrooge blame the Ghost of
Christmas Present for depriving the poor of the opportunity to have roasted dinner for
Christmas.
When Scrooge offers to discuss
Bob’s affairs “over a Christmas bowl
of Smoking Bishop,” he is referring
to a kind of punch. Here is the recipe:
Smoking Bishop
5 unpeeled, sweet oranges
1 unpeeled grapefruit
36 cloves
1/4 pound of sugar
2 bottles of red wine (strong)
1 bottle of port
Yield: 15 to 20 servings
Wash the fruit and bake them in the oven until
they are brownish. Turn once.
Put them into a warmed earthenware bowl with
six cloves pricked into each.
Add the sugar and pour in the wine - not the port.
Cover and leave in a warm place for a day.
Squeeze the fruit into the wine and strain.
Add the port and heat. DO NOT BOIL!
Serve "smoking hot" in small wine glasses.
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Literary Notes on Dickens’s “Ghostly Little Book” Shakespearean Allusions in A Christmas Carol
Not that we were very much concerned about
the apparent oddity of a Shakespearean theater
company producing a play version of A Christmas
Carol, but we though you might like to know that
Charles Dickens was an avid theater man who produced
and acted in plays from time to time, wrote at least two
plays, and was very familiar with Shakespeare, as we
can see from the several allusions to Shakespeare’s
plays in A Christmas Carol.
The first allusion is rather obvious. When he is
trying to emphasize the fact the Marley is dead, the
narrator of A Christmas Carol offers this observation about Shakespeare’s famous play
Hamlet:
If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet’s father died before the play
began, there would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a stroll at night,
in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts, that there would be in any other
middle-aged gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy spot—say St.
Paul’s Churchyard for instance—literally to astonish his son’s weak mind.
Marley’s experience of the afterlife
seems very similar to Hamlet’s father’s: too
terrible to relate. Hamlet’s father says
. . .I am forbid to tell the secrets of my
prison-house . . .
And Jacob says to Scrooge:
Nor can I tell you what I would.
In fact, this reference to the mysteries of life
after death recalls Hamlet’s immortal soliloquy
that begins
To be, or not to be . . .
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For in that speech Hamlet compares death to sleep:
. . .To die: to sleep,
To sleep, perchance to dream . . .
And it is in his dreams that Scrooge confronts some of the mysteries of his unhappy life
and impending death.
We have found another allusion to Shakespeare in A Christmas Carol, an allusion
to one of his lesser know plays, but that play, Measure for Measure contains a very
interesting passage that, it would seem, Dickens would like us to remember.
Here is what the narrator says of the Ghost of Christmas Present in A Christmas
Carol:
In almshouse, hospital, and jail, in misery’s every refuge, where vain man in
his little brief authority had not made fast the door and barred the Spirit out, he
left his blessing and taught Scrooge his precepts.
And here is a passage from Measure for Measure, Act II, scene ii.
. . .Merciful heaven,
Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt
Splits the unwedgeable and gnarled oak
Than the soft myrtle; but man, proud man,
Dress’d in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d
(His glassy essence), like an angry ape
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As makes the angels weep . . .
There seems to be no doubt that Dickens is swinging is “sledgehammer blow” for the
sake of the less fortunate in Victorian England.
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Emblems, Personification, Imagery, and Spirits
We have gotten out of the practice of thinking in terms of emblems and
personification in our less metaphorical and more empirical culture, but we must brush up
our skills if we are fully to appreciate what Dickens is up to with some of the capitalized
words in A Christmas Carol.
Perhaps the most vivid of these “capitalized words” are Ignorance and Want. It
wasn’t so long ago that people could, without thinking too much about it, conjure up
some concrete image of abstractions like these. For example, if, when I say Justice, you
picture a blindfolded woman with a sword in one hand and a pair of scales in the other,
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you have conjured up a popular image of the abstract idea “Justice.” Imagine doing this
with a broad variety of abstractions: Greed, perhaps, or Liberty (yes, that’s the Lady in
New York Harbor).
In A Christmas Carol, Dickens constantly gives us concrete images for abstract
ideas. You may be able to define “Ignorance” as “a profound lack of knowledge, the state
of being uneducated,” and you may define “Want” as
“poverty, the state being without the necessities of life,” but
such definitions do not have the impact of Dickens’s
emblems:
They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meager, 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 shriveled 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. . . This boy is
Ignorance. This girl is Want.
All of the emblems we have discussed so far are persons. Although emblems
need not always be a person (think of the Florida Marlins), or even animate (think of the
Boston Red Sox), it is very common to think of abstractions as persons, because it is very
common for poets and novelists to use personification to make their works more vivid.
Consider this passage from A Christmas Carol:
To see the dingy cloud come drooping
down, obscuring everything, one might
have thought that Nature lived hard by,
and was brewing on a large scale.
Or this:
Want is keenly felt and Abundance
rejoices.
Or this:
The fog and frost so hung about the
black old gateway of the house, that it
seemed as if the Genius of Weather sat
in mournful meditation on the
threshold.
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In each case, the capitalized words perform a piece of literary magic and change
an abstract noun into some character’s name. Only a character, a person, can “brew,”
“rejoice,” or “meditate.”
Notice how the Genius of Weather is not exactly the same thing as a character
named “Weather.” It’s the difference between Weather meditating, and some mighty
creator of weather meditating. “Mother Nature” is not the same thing as “Nature.” In A
Christmas Carol, Dickens creates three supernatural beings that are not strictly
personifications of abstract ideas, nor are they mere physical characters. The three
Ghosts of Christmas are characters that have strong emblematic power. They are images
of ideas, but they are also powerful movers of the plot of the story. So, “The Ghost of
Christmas Present” is not a personification of Christmas, but rather a being that contains
within its nature many of the aspects of our (or Dickens’s) idea of what Christmas is
about.
Nor are these “Ghosts” the only metaphysical
entities in the story. Recall again this very
interesting passage from A Christmas Carol:
. . .As close to it as I am now to you, and I am
standing in the spirit at your elbow.
The narrator suggests that although he is not
physically present to the reader, his nonphysical spirit is indeed very close. This idea
of a person’s “spirit” being some sort of nonphysical essence helps us to understand how
Dickens thought about Jacob Marley’s ghost.
Marley says this:
It is required of every man that the spirit within him should walk abroad among
his fellow-men, and travel far and wide; and if that spirit goes not forth in life,
it is condemned to do so after death.
Marley is not suggesting that he had physically to travel the world, but that his spirit was
required to reach out in some non-material way to humanity.
When The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shows Scrooge Tiny Tim’s grave,
Scrooge exclaims”
Spirit of Tiny Tim, thy childish essence was from God!
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Dickens shows us very vividly a way to think of our own essences when he
encourages us to think of Dickens’s spirit at our elbow, reaching out and urging us to be
involved not only in the story, but in all the affairs of the human community.
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A Christmas Carol in the Theater A Brief Production History
A Christmas Carol has had a life in the theater almost from the first moment it
was published. The book came out on December 19, 1843, and by February 1844 no
fewer than eight theatrical companies had mounted productions.
Even though Dickens sued to stop the pirated published versions of the story, he
did not try to stop the theatrical productions. He thought that the theatrical productions
made the story more accessible to the working people in
England. The workers who attended the plays could not
afford to buy the book. The book sold for 5 shillings, one
third of Bob Cratchit’s weekly wages, but attending the a
play was much less expensive.
Dickens himself loved the theater, wrote at least
two plays, and almost became a professional actor.
Dickens’ popularity during his life was due in no
small part to his public readings of his works. He gave
his first public reading of A Christmas Carol in
Birmingham, England just after Christmas in 1853 at a
benefit for the Educational Institute there. In the
audience were 2,000 workers. According to Dickens
himself, the audience “lost nothing, misinterpreted
nothing, followed everything closely, laughed and cried.”
At his later commercial readings, he always insisted that there be cheap seats so that the
less affluent could attend.
At first, his “public reading” version of the story was three hours long. Later he
trimmed that version to a 90-minute performance. He portrayed the characters in
different voices. The centerpiece of Dickens’s performance version was the Cratchit
family’s Christmas. He did not read, but recited the story and it changed from
performance to performance as he remembered, forgot, and improvised different parts.
He apparently performed the Fezziwig dance with his hands, as if his hand were puppets
and his fingers Fezziwig’s dancing legs. His last public reading of A Christmas Carol
was delivered in March 1870 just before his death.
Since then A Christmas Carol has been adapted into movies, radio dramas,
readings, and numerous stage productions. Regional theaters in many cities in the United
States have their traditional presentation of A Christmas Carol at this time of year.
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Notes about the NCSF Production
This year’s production of A Christmas Carol dates back to 1989 when Louis
Rackoff first directed his own adaptation of the book. Rackoff’s production was revised
in small ways over the years, and the settings were completely redesigned in 2000, but
there are several elements at the core of his version that have not changed.
In the early 1980’s the Royal Shakespeare Company produced a highly influential
adaptation of Charles Dickens’s novel Nicholas Nickelby. The production was famous
for it’s length (about six hours divided over two nights), narrative style, double casting,
and ensemble approach to story telling. Although NCSF’s A Christmas Carol is only
about two hours in length (including intermission), it shares with that RSC production of
Nicholas Nickleby the ensemble approach to story telling.
You will see various characters take turns
telling the narrative parts of the story to the audience.
You will also note that several actors play more than
one part, and that the double casting has a thematic
design. You may notice that all of the ghosts in the
play appear also as real people in Scrooge’s life. The
actor who plays Marley, for example, also plays a
Puppeteer. One of the Philanthropists reappears as
the Ghost of Christmas Past, and the other as the
Ghost of Christmas Present. The Ghost of Christmas
Yet to Come exists as a beggar in Scrooge’s waking
Allan Edwards as Scrooge in 2003
Photo by Patrick Terrell
life.
The current production has strong allusions to
the theater of Dickens’s day, recalling that Dickens
himself was a theater man. You will see puppet shows, placards advertising plays, and an
actor wearing a sandwich board selling tickets to a Shakespearean production.
Many of the images you will see on stage recall Christmas Cards in their design.
And finally, there are many songs in the play, some traditional, some composed
by David Bishop especially for The North Carolina Shakespeare Festival.
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Quests and Questions: Here are some suggestions for activities, discussions, and explorations that you
might consider as you prepare to see our production of A Christmas Carol.
Reading the Book
A Christmas Carol is not a long book. You could read it to yourself in about 3
hours sitting by a fire all nice and cozy with your cat and your cup of tea. You also could
do what President Franklin Roosevelt, Charles Dickens himself, Lionel Barrymore, and
many others have done: Read it to your friends aloud. Divide the class up into five
groups. The book is divided into five chapters, called “Staves.” Let each group choose a
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“Stave” and shorten it down to the best 15 minutes. Then each group can read their Stave
in parts, doing all the voices, and maybe even acting out a scene or two.
Playing Christmas Games
In A Christmas Carol the guests at Fred’s party play a game called “Yes and No.”
You can play, too. Start with the oldest person in the class and let that person be “It.”
“It” must think of something that has to do with Christmas. Write that something down
on a piece of paper and keep it secret. Everyone else asks “It” yes-or-no questions about
what is on the paper until someone can guess what it is. Only yes-or-no questions are
allowed, and, of course, “It” must tell the truth. When the secret is guessed, whoever
guessed right is the next “It.”
As an example: Is it an animal? NO. Is it a plant. YES. Is it green? YES. Does it
have red berries? NO. Does it have needles? YES. Is it a Christmas Tree? YES. You can
probably think of better things to guess.
Paint a Picture
There are many vivid characters in A Christmas Carol, and Charles Dickens is
famous for his descriptions. Read the description of your favorite character and draw a
picture of what you imagine the character to look like. The first edition of A Christmas
Carol had illustrations and over the years many people have drawn pictures of the people
and episodes in the book. This Study Guide has several images from the first edition.
See what pictures you can draw. Maybe your picture could become your family’s
holiday card this year.
Christmas Traditions
A Christmas Carol has become part of our Christmas tradition among Englishspeaking people. What other Christmas traditions do you celebrate in your family?
Perhaps your family celebrates a different holiday this time of year. Write story that
includes details about your own traditions. Maybe the story is about someone you know
whose life was changed by the spirit of your traditions.
The Olden Days
Choose one modern device in your house and imagine what life was like without
it in Dickens’s time. Bob Cratchit had no computer to do his work with. There were no
cars to travel in, although railroads were just beginning to be built. There were no
phones, no television or radio. Just chose one object and see if you can get through the
day without using it. With your parents’ permission, you might try to see what one hour
in the evening without electricity would be like. Chose an hour after dinner. Don’t use
any lights. No television. Nothing that uses electricity. What will you do? Read? How
will you see? How will your life be different for that hour or two without electricity?
Write about your experiment.
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Poverty and Wealth
The “Ghost of an Idea” that Charles Dickens mentions in his preface to A
Christmas Carol has to do with definitions of wealth and poverty. If Dickens can change
our ideas about what it means to be rich and poor, he can change the world. Before you
see the play, write a paper that defines Poverty and defines Wealth. What causes people
to be poor? How do people get rich? What makes someone rich? At what level of
income to people fall into poverty? Can Poverty be prevented? How?
Be prepared to write more after you have seen the play to see if your ideas on
Poverty and Wealth have been changed.
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Sights and Insights: Here are some suggestions for activities, discussions, and explorations that you
might consider after you have seen our production of A Christmas Carol.
Dickensian Names
One thing people recognize as peculiar to Charles Dickens’s fiction is the oddity
of the names he chooses for his characters. “Scrooge” is such an odd, but apt name for an
old miser that it seems unlikely that Scrooge’s sister would have been named “Fan
Scrooge,” but, in fact, she would have to have been. “Fezziwig” is a name that tells us a
lot about the comical persona of young Ebenezer’s employer.
It can be fun to find pictures of anonymous (that is nameless)
people and create a Dickensian name for them. You have to imagine
an entire biography to help. As a creative writing exercise, find a
striking picture of some unknown person and create a name and a
history for them. As an example, consider the fellow in the photo to
the right. His name (as I imagine it) is Malachi Mumblegums, the
mediocre 18th Century actor. The fellow in the background is the
perhaps more well known thespian Terrence Thwacker.
Create an Emblem
Now that you’ve seen some emblems
brought to life on stage, perhaps you would like to
try creating your own emblem of something.
Advertising people do this all the time and get paid
a lot of money for it. Suppose you start with your
hometown. If all the essence of your hometown
were in an object or an animal or a person or an
imaginary creature, what would it be? Many of us
have seen the image of Uncle Sam. This character
is an emblem for the United States Government.
Try creating an “Uncle Sam” type character for
your hometown, or school, or club.
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Or, if you are the more analytical type, choose a famous emblem and write a paper
discussing how it communicates the characteristics of the institution or abstraction it
represents. Uncle Sam, for example, seems, in the image above, to embody some of the
more stern aspects of the United States Government. He seems strong and determined.
Are these aspects of the United States as you understand them?
Or, think about the Ghost of Christmas Present. There is a new Ghost of
Christmas Present every year that embodies the spirit of Christmas for that year. The
Ghost we see in A Christmas Carol embodies the Christmas Spirit for 1843. What would
the Ghost of Christmas Present for 2005 be like? Remember that you don’t have to draw
the character. You can describe him (or her!) just like Charles Dickens did.
A Christmas Carol II
Many theatrical adaptations of Charles Dickens’s novel have been written. Could
you write a version of A Christmas Carol that takes place in your school? Who would be
the “Scrooge” character? How would you depict the “Cratchit Family”?
Or, you may like to try to tell the story of what happens to the characters after the
play has ended. What happens to Tiny Tim? What happens next Christmas when Fred
comes to visit his Uncle Scrooge at the counting house? Does Scrooge change the
“Scrooge and Marley” sign over the window?
If you delight in sad stories perhaps you can imagine the funeral of Scrooge when
he finally really dies. Is he loved? Are there many people who miss him? What does he
do with all his money?
Write these stories as stories or, better yet, as short plays that can be acted out.
A Chart of English Money
It might be very helpful to research the currency of another country. You could,
for example, create a chart of English money, their coins, their bills, and the names they
use for their money. You could show how much the different denominations are worth,
and even give an approximation of the exchange rate. The exchange rate tells you how to
trade one currency for another when, for example, you visit England and have to trade
your dollars for pounds. The exchange rate changes day to day and you can tell your
classmates where to look in the newspaper or online for reports on it.
Poverty and Wealth
If you wrote a paper about Poverty and Wealth before you came to see the show,
write more describing what impact the play had on your ideas.
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Contact Us If you have any questions about this study guide or what’s in it, please contact the
Outreach Education Director of The North Carolina Shakespeare Festival:
[email protected].
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