December 21, 2024 • 43 mins
In this episode, Dr. Himes steps you through Stave I of A Christmas Carol, giving you background and context to get the most out of your reading.
He frames Carol as Scrooge's journey through Purgatory, helping you understand Dickens' interpretation of Christianity through the ideas of Dante. Then he discusses Charles Dickens as a narrator, that his "First Person Omniscient" style wasn't just Dickens' particular style, but how he enhanced his "brand" by personalizing himself in the text.
Next, he covers the opening paragraph and why it's important that Marley was as dead as a doornail, and why the Hamlet allusion is key to understanding Dickens' Christian worldview.
Dr. Himes then explains where "Bah Humbug" comes from, and he breaks down Scrooge and Marley's company, putting it in the context of London and the financing of the British Empire in the 1840s. He covers Scrooge's politics by describing the real politician who said that the poor should die and rid England of its surplus population.
Dr. Himes ends the episode with a brief tour through Scrooge's London, including Marley's house that Scrooge inherited, which is a serious piece of London real estate with its roots in the Dutch Empire of the 1600s. He returns to Dante to help us understand Dickens' description of Marley Ghost, and why the chains are so significant.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:25):
Hello and welcome to Living Literature.
Today I will walk you through stave one of A Christmas Carol, paragraph by paragraph.
The idea here is not to bog you down with minutiae and allusions, but to give you a, first, a broad framework for more deeply understanding Carol as a literary work. 4 00:00:43,9.999 --> 00:00:48,270 And second, to give you some context for some of the details that will really help illuminate the work.
(00:48):
And hopefully this will make your reading of A Christmas Carol more rewarding and cast this familiar work in a new light.
So, to that end, my framework for understanding the Christmas Carol is admittedly a bit speculative on my part.
I will help you envision Scrooge's London and his encounter with Marley's ghost as a vision of purgatory.
(01:12):
Purgatory.
.999In medieval Christian and later Catholic belief, Purgatory is an intermediate afterlife space where souls are purified before entering heaven.
.999Purgatory doesn't really exist in most Protestant belief systems.
.999It's called Hades by the Lutherans, for example, but it's not a place where sins are purged from the soul.
(01:33):
Over time, Dante's vision of Purgatory had come to define it almost like canon.
The Divine Comedy isn't just Dante's Inferno.
.999The Inferno is just one part where Virgil guides Dante through the circles of hell.
Purgatorio is part two where later and at the end, Beatrice guides Dante through the circles of Purgatory.
(01:56):
Where souls are bound for a certain time to do penance for a certain punishment, the length of which is determined by the severity of their sin and the sinner's level of contrition.
We'll flesh this idea out as we go, but just know this, purgatory is time bound.
Physically confining and the seven deadly sins of purgatory are some sort of betrayal of true love. 19 00:02:24,334.999 --> 00:02:37,385 You do your punishment in purgatory, cleansing your soul of wrath, envy, pride, sloth, lust, gluttony, greed, and then you emerge at the top of the mountain ready to enter paradise.
(02:38):
And so a Christmas Carol, like the Divine Comedy, is a story in a condensed time frame where a sinner is guided by a ghostly figure in a tripartite structure to deeply interrogate the nature of sin and true Christian meaning.
Now, the only scholar I've found who has written on this connection is Professor Stephen Burtman at the University of Windsor in Windsor, Ontario, in a 2007 article called Dante's role in the genesis of Dickens A Christmas Carol from Dickens Quarterly.
(03:12):
Professor Burtman deep dives into evidence of Dickens knowledge of Dante, that certain books were found in Dickens libraries at his various homes, but most intriguingly, we know that the most prevalent translation of the Divine Comedy into English at the time was by a man named Henry Francis Carey, who was an assistant librarian in the British Museum at the time when A quote, young Dickens was frequently it's reading room as a cub reporter intent on enlarging his mind.
(03:46):
In other words, Charles Dickens spent a lot of time when he was early in his career as a young reporter in the British Museum educating himself on the greats of literature.
And there's no proof of the two's meeting, but considering the circumstances, it seems very likely that, even if they did not meet, Dickens would have been familiar with his work on Dante.
(04:09):
Dickens was extremely well read, especially of the great classics, and when you consider that some very specific lines from Scrooge are very similar to lines in the Divine Comedy, The similarities in the physical descriptions of Satan and Scrooge are uncanny.
I'm just going to say that that Dante was a major influence on A Christmas Carol. 27 00:04:33,800.001 --> 00:04:39,720.001 And I hope that this framing will help you understand the religiosity of the story. 28 00:04:42,300.001 --> 00:04:47,570.001 All right, so let's open with Dickens as narrator. 29 00:04:47,830.001 --> 00:04:50,60.001 If we go to the preface, C. 30 00:04:50,60.001 --> 00:04:50,430.001 D., 31 00:04:50,450.001 --> 00:05:04,640.001 as Dickens always signed his book, says, I have endeavored in this ghostly little book to raise the ghost of an idea, which shall not put my readers out of humor with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. 32 00:05:05,50.001 --> 00:05:09,530.001 May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it. 33 00:05:10,0.001 --> 00:05:12,410.001 So here, Dickens establishes two things. 34 00:05:12,430.001 --> 00:05:15,930.001 First, this is a ghost story. 35 00:05:16,190.001 --> 00:05:23,480.001 It is supernatural, and it is not intended to scare or to scold, but to haunt pleasantly.
(05:23):
dear reader, no matter how unpleasant this first stave might be, all will be well in the end.
So, you don't have to risk getting upset with me, dear reader, I am telling you a story with a happy ending.
Merry Christmas.
.999And second, it is I, your faithful friend and servant, one Charles Dickens, who will be your guide. 40 00:05:50,299.999 --> 00:06:02,480 And this is important because the Christmas Carol is written in something like first person omniscient, where he, Charles Dickens is the narrator of the story.
(06:02):
.9And this was not just a, device, but an essential part of the Dickens brand that he employed over and over again, Dickens was deeply involved in the business of publishing and he fought with his publishers all the time, including, starting his own literary magazine and going out on his own.
(06:24):
to publish a tale of two cities in 1859 it was deeply important to Dickens that his identity was portable and unique to him so when you buy a subscription to a literary magazine Dickens didn't want you to experience a Chapman and Hall publication as much as he wanted you to feel like Charles Dickens is there with you in your sitting room sharing a story with you.
(06:52):
This personal connection was not just Dickens's way of telling the story, but it was his way of building a relationship directly with you.
And so his writer's voice is much better understood as a script.
Indeed, later in life, Dickens made most of his money performing his own scripts based on his books.
(07:16):
It was almost like the literature was created for the performances.
Dickens basically invented the book tour, and it was great business for him. 48 00:07:27,239.999 --> 00:07:32,100 But as a literary matter, if you find Dickens hard to slog through, you're not alone.
.999Dickens is best enjoyed aloud, and that's why I think A Christmas Carol works so well on the stage, where a Dickens stand in like Gonzo in A Muppet Christmas Carol performs lines from the text, sometimes as Dickens. 50 00:07:46,794.999 --> 00:07:53,414.999 Dickens himself, he considered himself an actor, and he wrote for professional actors to perform. 51 00:07:53,415.099 --> 00:08:02,874.999 He published serially, where his works were read aloud in pubs and ale houses performed by the dockmen who could read and love to ham it up.
(08:04):
So, Dickens omniscient narration is also very important to his structure.
Dickens stories jump from place to place.
Like a Baz Luhrmann film where the camera can be backstage at an opera and then fly out of the window above the great city and then swoop down to another part of the city to find a man walking, into the great city at night.
(08:29):
.9995Dickens very much wrote cinematically. 56 00:08:32,154.9995 --> 00:08:52,100 Dickens ahead of his time with deeply descriptive visual passages and atmospherics that's like handwritten cinematography and a narration camera that in this story literally flies Scrooge across England so that he can see the effects of dire poverty on the people.
(08:53):
So let's now get to And there's a lot to cover on the first page because Dickens lays down a lot of context.
He basically gives you the point of the story up front and then starts the narrative.
In his first paragraphs, Dickens often uses unusual punctuation that point you directly to the point.
(09:17):
.001Here, Dickens opens a Christmas Carol with Marley was dead, colon, space, space to begin with. 61 00:09:28,500.001 --> 00:09:30,320.001 That colon is important. 62 00:09:31,70.001 --> 00:09:37,510.001 Here, it's that, to begin with, we need you to know that Marley is dead. 63 00:09:37,850.001 --> 00:09:40,470.001 This is a ghost story. 64 00:09:40,700.001 --> 00:09:42,970.001 It involves the supernatural. 65 00:09:43,230.001 --> 00:09:46,410.001 It is spiritual in nature. 66 00:09:47,110.001 --> 00:09:49,940.001 Scrooge is not imagining Marley. 67 00:09:50,70.001 --> 00:09:51,560.001 There's no prank here. 68 00:09:52,100.001 --> 00:09:57,450.001 And thus, Dickens wants to establish the religiosity of a Christmas carol. 69 00:09:57,980.001 --> 00:10:01,890 Thus, Marley is dead as a doornail. 70 00:10:02,660.001 --> 00:10:06,794.901 Dead as a doornail is a funny phrase that extends back to Shakespeare's time. 71 00:10:06,985.001 --> 00:10:15,385.001 Long story short, nails used to be handmade and very sturdy, often repurposed from project to project over decades or even over centuries.
(10:15):
.001But door nails would hold together wood from both sides of the door. 73 00:10:21,595.001 --> 00:10:28,475.001 So the nail would be driven all the way through, then bent near the tip and then hammered into the door like a staple. 74 00:10:28,865.001 --> 00:10:34,455 And thus that nail door nails could not be repurposed for another project. 75 00:10:35,115.001 --> 00:10:37,175.001 The nail doesn't have another life. 76 00:10:38,5.001 --> 00:10:38,845.001 It is dead. 77 00:10:39,665.001 --> 00:10:54,615.001 So that history of dead as a doornail phrase sets up the joke in the second paragraph where Dickens says, the wisdom of the ancestors is in the simile, and my unhallowed hand shall not disturb it, or the country's done for. 78 00:10:54,865.001 --> 00:11:01,705.001 This is a joke that Dickens makes very often, that England is old and stodgy and traditional and. 79 00:11:01,740.001 --> 00:11:02,170.001 Dark. 80 00:11:02,170.001 --> 00:11:03,970.001 Our practices don't make any sense. 81 00:11:04,260.001 --> 00:11:05,810.001 Everything is inconvenient. 82 00:11:06,100.001 --> 00:11:13,880.001 And if we change anything, the entire country will fall apart and Englishness will cease to be. 83 00:11:14,470.001 --> 00:11:27,340.001 So this is Dickens expressing the irony of English conservatism in the classic sense, which moves us into the third paragraph, which, requires a little bit of speculation. 84 00:11:28,390.001 --> 00:11:38,710 What was the relationship between Scrooge and Marley? Obviously they were partners, and there wasn't really any hint of anything beyond that. 85 00:11:39,180.001 --> 00:11:46,714.901 We'll see later that there is some suggestion that Marley was older than Scrooge, and yet the firm's name was Scrooge and Marley. 86 00:11:49,55.001 --> 00:12:02,825.001 Dickens does his repeating of language thing to make the point that Scrooge was the sole executor, listed first, sole administrator, sole assigned, sole residituary, legatee, sole friend, and sole mourner. 87 00:12:03,85.002 --> 00:12:04,419.902 Marley had it. 88 00:12:04,850.002 --> 00:12:06,270.002 Nobody else. 89 00:12:07,160.002 --> 00:12:17,720.002 So is this why Scrooge sought him as a partner? Did he forge this partnership for the inheritance? I mean, we know that Marley also left Scrooge his house. 90 00:12:17,840.002 --> 00:12:24,89.902 Which even in 1843 would have been a very valuable piece of City of London real estate. 91 00:12:24,750.002 --> 00:12:28,680.002 And as we'll see, Scrooge was very much afraid of debt. 92 00:12:29,330.002 --> 00:12:45,350.002 There's very little else about the nature of their relationship, but it does seem like Scrooge set himself up with the exact opposite kind of partnership than was proposed to him by his fiancée Belle, who we will meet in Stave 2. 93 00:12:45,530.002 --> 00:12:47,60.002 And we'll talk about this later. 94 00:12:48,470.002 --> 00:12:52,805.002 Now, On to paragraph four in The Illusion to Hamlet. 95 00:12:53,675.002 --> 00:13:00,435.002 In Dickens original handwritten manuscript, he crosses out a large part of the end of this paragraph. 96 00:13:00,845.001 --> 00:13:30,335.001 In his introduction to the original manuscript edition of A Christmas Carol, where you can read the printed text alongside Dickens handwriting, Declan Kiley, the former curator at the Morgan Library, which owns Dickens A Christmas Carol manuscript, writes that, The ghost of Hamlet's father is introduced, leading to a digression concerning the character of Hamlet that Dickens seems to have immediately recognized as superfluous and potentially distracting from the scenario he was establishing. 97 00:13:31,435.002 --> 00:13:32,865.002 I disagree. 98 00:13:33,635.002 --> 00:13:42,405.002 This goes back to my impression of Dante's Influence on Dickens. 99 00:13:42,595.002 --> 00:13:47,945.002 Because in Hamlet, the ghost of Hamlet's father appears to Prince Hamlet. 100 00:13:48,385.002 --> 00:13:51,505.002 Doomed for a certain term to walk the night. 101 00:13:51,835.001 --> 00:13:54,915.002 And for the day confined to fast and fires. 102 00:13:54,935.002 --> 00:13:59,255.001 Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature are burnt and purged away. 103 00:13:59,890.002 --> 00:14:03,880.002 But, that I am forbid to tell the secrets of my prison house. 104 00:14:04,190.002 --> 00:14:10,390.002 I could a tale unfold whose lightest word would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood. 105 00:14:11,320.001 --> 00:14:16,350.002 And this is very much a description of purgatory. 106 00:14:16,850.001 --> 00:14:21,860.002 The spirit from beyond, warning of how sins in the world will doom you. 107 00:14:22,340.002 --> 00:14:51,235.002 But you walk for a certain term it is time bound to a kind of hell until your crimes are purged Hamlet the play was written around 1600 toward the end of the reign of Elizabeth I whose father Henry VIII separated England from the Catholic Church and created the Protestant Church of England Which has traditionally defied the existence of purgatory. 108 00:14:51,785.002 --> 00:14:56,225.002 So Shakespeare wrote Hamlet in a time of doctrinal confusion. 109 00:14:56,235.002 --> 00:15:16,200.001 Like, do we not believe in purgatory now? Because the king wanted a divorce? And in the play, Prince Hamlet was sent to college in Wittenberg, the home of none other than Martin Luther, who tacked up his 95 theses 83 years before Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. 110 00:15:16,880.002 --> 00:15:23,220.002 So part of the spiritual conflict of this play is this very sudden change in doctrine. 111 00:15:23,960.002 --> 00:15:26,970.002 Prince Hamlet is being raised and educated. 112 00:15:27,45.002 --> 00:15:29,525.002 Explicitly as a protestant king. 113 00:15:29,625.002 --> 00:15:51,955.002 That's why he's being sent to wittenberg But he very much seems to have a catholic soul not just in his fixation on guilt But in his open acceptance of the idea that his father's spirit must be released from purgatory I was raised protestant but taught in catholic school So I understand this conflict and i've often sensed it in dickens. 114 00:15:52,115.002 --> 00:16:02,145.002 We know that dickens was a deeply spiritual man But he despised human Institutions and so priests of all sorts are the villains in his stories. 115 00:16:02,255.002 --> 00:16:05,655.002 He was not a doctrinal Anglican. 116 00:16:06,625.002 --> 00:16:15,645.001 Thematically his fiction fixates on guilt, forgiveness, absolution, very catholic ideas. 117 00:16:15,645.001 --> 00:16:26,425.001 Nowhere does he suggest that say the human act of baptism for instance is any way a substitute for individual acts to make your wrongs. 118 00:16:27,945.002 --> 00:16:31,245.002 That's why I think this allusion to Hamlet's father is a big deal. 119 00:16:31,435.002 --> 00:16:33,975.002 And why it helps us understand the story. 120 00:16:34,335.002 --> 00:16:39,275.002 Dickens loved Shakespeare and he was always working towards Shakespeare's reputation. 121 00:16:39,285.002 --> 00:16:48,765.0015 He would have been finally attuned to this reading of Shakespeare and establishes up front that these ghosts are like the ghosts in Shakespeare. 122 00:16:48,765.0015 --> 00:16:50,955.0015 So now we get our first glimpse of Scrooge. 123 00:16:50,995.0015 --> 00:16:53,735.0015 A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping. 124 00:16:54,210.0015 --> 00:16:56,70.0015 Clutching, covetous old sinner. 125 00:16:56,480.0015 --> 00:17:04,560.0015 And sinner, I think, here's the key word, which emphasizes Dickens conception that this is, above all else, a Christian story. 126 00:17:05,70.0015 --> 00:17:22,850.0015 There's, the other piece of this is how cold Scrooge is, not just in personality, where no beggars implored him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him, it was o'clock, but how physically cold, the cold, bleak, biting weather was. 127 00:17:23,555.0015 --> 00:17:36,845.0005 This, again, is where we see the influence of Dante, not just the influence of Dante's ideas of purgatory on Shakespeare's writing, but in the Inferno, Satan isn't engulfed by hellfire. 128 00:17:38,355.0015 --> 00:17:42,75.0005 He is encased in ice up to his waist. 129 00:17:42,315.0005 --> 00:17:44,5.0015 Satan is cold. 130 00:17:44,215.0015 --> 00:17:53,595.0005 And in the words of Dante's scholar, Rachel Jacob, the deepest isolation is to suffer separation from the source of all light in life. 131 00:17:55,770.0015 --> 00:18:00,360.0015 Think of every movie adaptation of A Christmas Carol you've ever seen. 132 00:18:00,720.0015 --> 00:18:05,160.0005 The tall buildings at the very center of the city of London shadowing out the sun. 133 00:18:05,500.0015 --> 00:18:10,40.0005 The fog settling into the narrow streets between the banks and the counting houses. 134 00:18:10,300.0015 --> 00:18:14,140.0015 The small fires built in alleyways to provide small warmth. 135 00:18:14,610.0015 --> 00:18:24,340.0015 Where this dark cloaked, shriveled man walks the urban streets with, in Dickens words, No eye at all is better than evil eyed Dark Master. 136 00:18:24,355.1015 --> 00:18:37,145.0015 This is Scrooge's London, towards the end of the Little Ice Age, where the Thames froze solid every year until the pollution became so bad that it changed the composition of the water. 137 00:18:37,905.0015 --> 00:18:43,695.0015 So, in this context, the city blocks had only just gone three. 138 00:18:43,735.0015 --> 00:18:45,755.0005 It had not been light all day. 139 00:18:46,75.0015 --> 00:18:57,365.0015 The fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole and was so dense without that, although the court was of the narrowest, the houses opposite were mere phantoms. 140 00:18:58,245.0015 --> 00:19:01,454.9015 With Dickens, the fog is always there. 141 00:19:02,845.0015 --> 00:19:10,845.0005 In every Dickens story, where the London Fog sits on the city, expect the banality of evil. 142 00:19:11,225.0015 --> 00:19:18,865.0015 Not fire breathing revolutionaries, but the evil of lawyers, priests, schoolmasters, and moneylenders. 143 00:19:19,485.0005 --> 00:19:24,265.0015 Inside Scrooge's office, the clerk's fire had one coal. 144 00:19:24,415.0015 --> 00:19:35,455.0015 And as a quick aside, much of The London fog of this time was indeed smog because the constant burning of coal is how London became the big smoke. 145 00:19:36,805.0015 --> 00:19:41,635.0015 And so, at this point, in walks Scrooge's nephew Fred. 146 00:19:42,45.0005 --> 00:19:45,275.0015 A Merry Christmas, Uncle, and God save you, cried a cheery voice. 147 00:19:46,55.0015 --> 00:19:50,985.0015 And now, before we get to Bah Humbug, let's think a little on Scrooge's family. 148 00:19:51,425.0015 --> 00:20:03,800.0015 In Stave 2, we will learn That young Ebenezer was hated by his father, but his sister Fann convinced him to let Ebenezer come home for Christmas from boarding school, probably for good. 149 00:20:04,580.0015 --> 00:20:07,750.0015 But Fann also died giving birth to Fred. 150 00:20:08,10.0015 --> 00:20:17,520.0015 And we'll get to all of this in stave 2, but for now, it's enough to know that Scrooge's nephew just wants to connect with what little family he has. 151 00:20:17,810.0015 --> 00:20:24,250.0005 But doing so would force Ebenezer to confront his sadness and anger about the loss. 152 00:20:27,140.0015 --> 00:20:30,690.0015 So, for Scrooge, Christmas is here. 153 00:20:31,65.0015 --> 00:20:32,785.0015 is humbug. 154 00:20:33,395.0015 --> 00:20:49,45.0005 For this section, I am borrowing from the work of Richard Jones, a blue badge tour guide in London who specializes in historical tours, Dickens in particular, and I've taken his tours and once as part of the Dickens symposium, and I can personally attest that Richard is fine company to enjoy a pint with. 155 00:20:50,290.0015 --> 00:20:55,320.0015 Today, almost any use of humbug alludes to a Christmas carol. 156 00:20:56,990.0015 --> 00:21:03,610.0015 The word was prominent in the 1700s, even used as a verb, humbugging, to describe jokes and tall tales. 157 00:21:03,880.0015 --> 00:21:08,620.0005 There was even a play called The Humors of Humbug, featuring the character Harry Humbug. 158 00:21:09,40.0015 --> 00:21:14,440.0015 But over time, humbug became a political insult, to describe frauds on the public. 159 00:21:14,620.0015 --> 00:21:19,180.0015 That new salt tax they said wouldn't raise the price of food? The people have been humbugged. 160 00:21:19,420.0015 --> 00:21:24,390.0015 The lawyer who charges you for unnecessary court proceedings, he humbugged you. 161 00:21:25,250.0015 --> 00:21:33,760.0015 By the 1830s, humbug was applied widely to lying, deceitful politicians, especially members of parliament. 162 00:21:34,240.0005 --> 00:21:38,650.0015 Lord Cursley's speech about how much he cares for the poor, That's humbug. 163 00:21:39,30.0015 --> 00:21:44,990.0015 And remember, Dickens got his start in journalism as a parliamentary reporter. 164 00:21:44,990.0015 --> 00:21:56,0.0015 So humbug would have been a very common word for Dickens and his readers would have immediately grasped that Scrooge is saying to his nephew that Christmas is a fraud upon the public. 165 00:21:56,60.0015 --> 00:21:59,290.0015 It is a deceit and that he wants no part of this. 166 00:22:00,355.0015 --> 00:22:09,555.0015 Which is why Scrooge tells his nephew after Fred gives his speech about the Christmas spirit that I wonder you don't go into Parliament. 167 00:22:10,515.0005 --> 00:22:15,905.0015 So to Scrooge, what else is humbug? Marriage. 168 00:22:16,445.0015 --> 00:22:23,145.0015 And so when Scrooge asks Fred why he got married, his nephew says, Because I fell in love. 169 00:22:23,595.0015 --> 00:22:32,45.0015 And for Ebenezer, the only thing in the world more ridiculous than that, Christmas. 170 00:22:32,515.0015 --> 00:22:38,655.0015 This is a key point that we will return to and stay to with the ghost of Christmas past. 171 00:22:40,185.0015 --> 00:22:48,775.0015 Now, this brings us to the entry of the two gentlemen of charity, but let's pause for a moment and think about Scrooge's company. 172 00:22:49,775.0015 --> 00:22:50,475.0015 This is important. 173 00:22:50,485.0015 --> 00:22:52,915.0015 Let's figure out exactly what Scrooge does. 174 00:22:53,395.0015 --> 00:22:59,805.0005 In the 1840s, Scrooge's piece of the City of London was home to finance related offices. 175 00:23:00,65.0015 --> 00:23:05,485.0005 A few blocks away sits the Bank of England and Mansion House, the real centers of power and wealth. 176 00:23:05,825.0005 --> 00:23:11,685.0015 We are about 30 years past the defeat of Napoleon, which elevated Britain to global supremacy. 177 00:23:12,145.0015 --> 00:23:15,615.0015 Dickens wrote Carol at the rise of the British century. 178 00:23:15,945.0015 --> 00:23:18,485.0015 Pax Britannia's control of the seas. 179 00:23:18,705.0015 --> 00:23:22,775.0015 Nothing on the globe happened without the British touching it in one way or another. 180 00:23:23,375.0015 --> 00:23:32,345.0015 And it was here in this tiny square mile of the city of London was where nearly all world finance was moved. 181 00:23:32,585.0015 --> 00:23:38,425.0015 Right here in Scrooge's London was where wealth was invested in the British Raj of India. 182 00:23:38,665.0015 --> 00:23:48,105.0015 The colonization of New Zealand and the other and other islands in the Pacific, the occupation of Egypt to eventually build a canal there that would have shipping time to the far east. 183 00:23:48,395.0015 --> 00:23:55,165.0005 The great game of European domination waged against Russia and where the scramble for Africa began. 184 00:23:56,80.0015 --> 00:24:07,400.0015 It was also here where the wealth extracted from the people of those lands was laundered into the accounts of the British aristocracy and its investors. 185 00:24:07,870.0015 --> 00:24:13,315.0015 In a separate article, I will tell you about how in this way we can read That how Mr. 186 00:24:13,325.0015 --> 00:24:19,585.0015 George Banks paid for 17 Cherry Tree Lane and the services of his nanny, Mary Poppins, with plundered wealth. 187 00:24:20,875.0015 --> 00:24:24,485.0005 But Scrooge was not a banker on that scale. 188 00:24:25,185.0015 --> 00:24:31,235.0005 Rather, Scrooge seems to be a best in class, but still somewhat small time money lender. 189 00:24:31,465.0015 --> 00:24:34,775.0015 Perhaps the equivalent of a payday loan shark today. 190 00:24:35,555.0015 --> 00:24:47,125.0015 This was a time of the debtor's prisons, where debt was criminalized and people of all classes could be incarcerated for owning private entities money and not to go too deep into the history. 191 00:24:47,125.0015 --> 00:24:50,675.0015 But this is why bankruptcy law was enshrined in the American Constitution. 192 00:24:50,865.0015 --> 00:24:55,25.0005 Many of the early colonists came to America to escape incarceration for debts. 193 00:24:55,765.0015 --> 00:24:58,835.0015 Scrooge made his money from the poor. 194 00:24:58,995.0005 --> 00:25:07,900.0015 But history also tells us that during this time, The rise of the bourgeois middle class resulted in a lot of bourgeois overspending. 195 00:25:08,250.0015 --> 00:25:22,10.0015 Dickens father, for instance, had a decent government job and Dickens himself always struggled with money, but he overspent on houses, on a lifestyle, and on just playing the character of Charles Dickens in real life. 196 00:25:22,640.0015 --> 00:25:29,200.0015 So, Dickens positions Scrooge as a moneylender, one of the worst sinners in the Bible. 197 00:25:30,780.0015 --> 00:25:36,230.0015 The only time that the Lord used the whip was to drive the moneylenders away from the church. 198 00:25:36,400.0015 --> 00:25:38,440.0015 And thus, is Scrooge. 199 00:25:39,860.0015 --> 00:25:50,620.0015 And so, what is Scrooge's plan? Well, it's unclear whether Scrooge's contempt for the poor drove his choice of profession or vice versa. 200 00:25:50,930.0015 --> 00:25:54,630.0005 But Scrooge's contempt for the poor is a political question. 201 00:25:55,120.0005 --> 00:26:09,965.0015 This is the famous line where Scrooge says to the charity men, Are there no prisons? And the union workhouses, are they still in operation? The treadmill and the poor law are in full vigor then? And the men of charity say, look, people would rather die than go there. 202 00:26:10,565.0015 --> 00:26:16,595.0015 And Scrooge replies, if they would rather die, they had better do it and decrease the surplus population. 203 00:26:17,265.0015 --> 00:26:23,645.0005 A line that comes back to haunt Scrooge when the ghost of Christmas present shows him. 204 00:26:23,710.0015 --> 00:26:24,490.0015 Tiny Tim. 205 00:26:26,280.0015 --> 00:26:37,600.0015 This line is a direct quote from the works of English economists, the Reverend Thomas Robert Malus, whose work became known as the Malthusian Trap. 206 00:26:38,20.0015 --> 00:26:50,530.0015 The idea that increasing a nation's food production would eventually lead to a decrease in living standards because the resulting population growth would lead to food shortages. 207 00:26:51,335.0015 --> 00:26:54,355.0015 For Malthus, this created a spiritual problem. 208 00:26:54,915.0015 --> 00:27:03,425.0015 If population growth thwarts social progress, it's imperative for a nation to impose standards of virtue on its people. 209 00:27:03,955.0005 --> 00:27:12,585.0015 Being poor and hungry was the result of individual vice and wastefulness, not national policies or macroeconomics. 210 00:27:13,205.0015 --> 00:27:16,545.0015 Not that Malthus didn't have views on economic policies. 211 00:27:16,545.0015 --> 00:27:20,705.0015 He thought the poor laws created inflation, which hurt the virtuous well off. 212 00:27:20,895.0005 --> 00:27:25,895.0015 And he supported the corn laws, which taxed grain imports and spiked the price of bread. 213 00:27:27,135.0015 --> 00:27:37,245.0015 If the poor died because they couldn't afford food, well, they could have just avoided all the vice and wastefulness that put them in this situation. 214 00:27:37,665.0015 --> 00:27:43,530.0015 If that led to mass death, well, that's just the Surplus population. 215 00:27:44,90.0015 --> 00:27:50,320.0005 Their own vice and wastefulness dictated their own fate, and they would be judged accordingly by God. 216 00:27:51,400.0015 --> 00:27:54,180.0005 Malthus was controversial in his own lifetime. 217 00:27:54,520.0015 --> 00:28:11,760.0005 In An Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus said that Rousseau's views on income inequality and romantic individualism defied mathematical logic, that population increases exponentially, while food supply only increases linearly. 218 00:28:12,365.0015 --> 00:28:25,25.0015 And Malthus also beefed with William Godwin, the utilitarian and anarchist philosopher who was married to early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, whose daughter later became Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. 219 00:28:25,475.0005 --> 00:28:34,80.0015 Godwin was an early proponent of utilitarianism, But Malthus thought that the greatest happiness for the greatest number would lead to famine. 220 00:28:35,300.0015 --> 00:28:41,530.0015 This is the man that Dickens used as a model for Scrooge's politics. 221 00:28:42,0.0015 --> 00:28:44,720.0015 The poor are poor because they lack virtue. 222 00:28:44,870.0015 --> 00:28:52,920.0015 And if they die, well get on with it because the surplus population is taking food from the virtuous. 223 00:28:56,800.0015 --> 00:29:05,885.0015 Now, this leads us to The charity men leaving and Dickens shows us the city of London for the first time. 224 00:29:05,885.0015 --> 00:29:12,895.0005 And so let's talk about the city of London as a metaphor and a classic Dickens faction, the fog and darkness stick. 225 00:29:12,895.0015 --> 00:29:23,155.0015 And so that people ran about with flaring links with Dickens, the fog is always moral and he makes clear that what's about to happen to Scrooge. 226 00:29:23,205.0015 --> 00:29:29,265.0005 Isn't just about his individual acts, but about his politics as well. 227 00:29:30,185.064 --> 00:29:35,235.064 Here, Bob Cratchit asked for Christmas Day off, which Scrooge reluctantly relents to. 228 00:29:35,715.064 --> 00:29:39,875.064 When Bob leaves, he slides down Corn Hill 20 times before walking home. 229 00:29:40,65.063 --> 00:29:46,895.064 And Corn Hill is an actual hill, small hill, neighborhood just past Mansion House that Bob could have sled back in the day. 230 00:29:47,550.064 --> 00:29:58,70.064 But, and this is a detail that Dickens leaves out, Bob Cratchit's walk home would take about an hour and thirty minutes in the best of circumstances. 231 00:29:58,600.063 --> 00:30:05,890.063 The Cratchits live in Camden, a borough today most known for its punk scene back in the 70s and 80s. 232 00:30:06,180.063 --> 00:30:13,370.064 But in the 1840s though, it was a working class neighborhood, borderline slum, far away from the city of London itself. 233 00:30:14,110.064 --> 00:30:19,430.064 Dickens himself lived there when he was little during a time when his father was racked with debt. 234 00:30:19,700.064 --> 00:30:28,920.063 Today, there's even a blue plaque commemorating Dickens residence in Camden, which was almost surely a model for the Cratchit house. 235 00:30:29,510.064 --> 00:30:38,730.064 So, while Bob is setting off on his hour or two walk to go play blind man's bluff with his kids, Scrooge walks two minutes to the pub. 236 00:30:39,880.064 --> 00:30:43,630.064 In a separate post, I will take you through Scrooge's London by St. 237 00:30:43,640.064 --> 00:30:47,210.064 Michael's Church, whose shadows still today looms over Corn Hill. 238 00:30:47,890.064 --> 00:30:52,860.063 On his way, Scrooge sees ragged men and boys warming their hands by the fire. 239 00:30:52,940.064 --> 00:30:56,710.063 He walks by the church, down a narrow alley that's still there today. 240 00:30:56,920.063 --> 00:31:02,840.064 And when you're there, you can look up and imagine the frozen fog of a Christmas carol settling into the alley. 241 00:31:03,700.064 --> 00:31:10,500.064 in a very soup like manner before Scrooge takes his melancholy dinner in his melancholy tavern. 242 00:31:10,910.064 --> 00:31:12,960.064 This tavern, by the way, is still there. 243 00:31:13,150.064 --> 00:31:18,690.064 It's the George and Vulture which hosts various Dickens groups for pints and dinners. 244 00:31:20,325.064 --> 00:31:23,325.064 Now, let's talk about Marley's house. 245 00:31:24,315.064 --> 00:31:33,445.064 After Scrooge takes his dinner, Dickens gives up some rather intriguing details about Scrooge's deceased partner, Jacob Marley. 246 00:31:34,205.064 --> 00:31:40,45.063 Scrooge, apparently, inherited Marley's house, which is talked into a muse in the city of London. 247 00:31:40,515.064 --> 00:31:43,515.064 This would have been a very expensive piece of real estate. 248 00:31:44,385.064 --> 00:31:49,965.064 Scrooge would have already had dinner by the time Bob Cratchit made it back to Camden. 249 00:31:50,135.064 --> 00:31:58,205.063 This suggests that Marley had money, perhaps came from money, but had no family, or at least any that he would leave an inheritance to. 250 00:31:59,355.064 --> 00:32:02,255.064 Yet Scrooge's name was the first on the company door. 251 00:32:03,15.064 --> 00:32:13,455.064 And this house is big enough that Scrooge leveraged several extra rooms to rent as office space and the basement was rented to a wine merchant to hold his casks. 252 00:32:14,5.064 --> 00:32:18,815.064 In Scrooge's sitting room, Dickens details the old fireplace. 253 00:32:19,220.064 --> 00:32:28,550.064 Quote, built by some Dutch merchant long ago, paved all around with quaint Dutch tiles, designed to illustrate the scriptures. 254 00:32:29,430.063 --> 00:32:51,990.063 This Dutch detail is key, because it tells us that this house was once owned by a very rich merchant, probably from the Dutch East India Company from the Dutch Golden Age of the 1600s, when the Dutch Republic ruled the seas, dominating trade routes, The Atlantic slave trade, extensive colonial ventures, the world over. 255 00:32:52,240.063 --> 00:33:08,170.063 Now, London was still the financial center of the world, but in the very least, you would have had a population of rich Dutch merchants who could afford stairwells so wide that you could get a hearse up at broadwise broadwise. 256 00:33:08,750.063 --> 00:33:11,650.063 Dickens was very much aware of the influence of. 257 00:33:11,870.063 --> 00:33:13,720.063 Empire on this space. 258 00:33:14,370.063 --> 00:33:18,490.063 Marley's house is a serious piece of real estate. 259 00:33:19,200.063 --> 00:33:27,220.063 There's even a disused bell that hung in the room and communicated for some purpose, now forgotten with the change ber in the highest story of the building. 260 00:33:27,660.062 --> 00:33:35,490.063 This bell would have been used to summon servants, but Scrooge apparently is too cheap to employ them, and so he takes his little saucepan of gruel alone. 261 00:33:35,770.063 --> 00:33:38,80.063 No one else in this enormous house. 262 00:33:39,510.063 --> 00:33:52,530.063 So when Scrooge sees Marley's face on his doorknocker, Dickens said that Scrooge had not bestowed one thought on Marley since his last mention of his seven years dead partner that afternoon. 263 00:33:53,410.063 --> 00:33:57,760.062 Whatever happened to Marley, it seems like it was traumatic. 264 00:33:58,290.063 --> 00:34:04,260.063 And Scrooge reacts to it the same way that he reacted to the son of his dead sister. 265 00:34:04,710.063 --> 00:34:06,880.063 Shutting himself away from the world. 266 00:34:07,700.063 --> 00:34:11,780.063 Ebenezer Scrooge has suffered traumatic loss in his life. 267 00:34:11,930.063 --> 00:34:18,870.062 And this, for me, changes the traditional perception of Scrooge as just a plain old greedy miser. 268 00:34:19,500.063 --> 00:34:20,840.063 He's suffering from trauma. 269 00:34:21,340.063 --> 00:34:25,589.963 And we'll get to all of this with the Ghost of Christmas Past in Stave 2. 270 00:34:27,70.063 --> 00:34:30,20.063 And so now we get to the entry of Marley's Ghost. 271 00:34:31,490.063 --> 00:34:34,710.063 Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it. 272 00:34:35,170.063 --> 00:34:37,900.063 So Scrooge sits alone in his cheap darkness. 273 00:34:38,390.063 --> 00:34:40,810.063 Not a man to be frightened by echoes. 274 00:34:40,970.063 --> 00:34:44,20.113 As I talked about in, living literature episode 1. 275 00:34:44,20.113 --> 00:34:52,280.062 0, echoes is a metaphor that Dickens often employs to suggest that the distant past is now finally catching up to you in the present. 276 00:34:52,690.063 --> 00:34:58,750.064 Thus the ghost of Marley finds his way through the heavy door to Scrooge after double locking himself in. 277 00:34:59,780.064 --> 00:35:03,810.064 This, I think, is where we see more influence of Dante. 278 00:35:04,570.064 --> 00:35:13,440.064 Thus far, Dickens has described the city of London as a tiny enclosed space encased in a frozen fog, lighted only by small fires and gas lamps. 279 00:35:13,800.063 --> 00:35:27,169.964 In those hours, on Christmas Eve, where everything seems to shut down, as if we are suspended in an alternative universe that only happens once a year, and you really begin to feel it. 280 00:35:27,320.064 --> 00:36:06,420.064 feel the passage of time before church before dinner before gifts so the ghost of jacob marley body transparent but otherwise dressed as he was in life carrying a heavy chain made for cash boxes key padlocks ledgers deeds and heavy purses wrought in steel in the inferno and purgatorio Each sinner's punishment is a metaphorical representation of the sin itself so that the punishment is a perverse reenactment of that sin that you committed in life. 281 00:36:06,990.064 --> 00:36:09,890.063 Murderers stand in a river of boiling blood. 282 00:36:10,70.064 --> 00:36:14,610.064 Hypocrites wear robes that glitter on the outside but are weighted with lead underneath. 283 00:36:15,450.064 --> 00:36:20,990.064 And that is exactly what Dickens does with the ghost of Jacob Marley. 284 00:36:21,520.064 --> 00:36:22,290.064 In life. 285 00:36:22,510.064 --> 00:36:29,0.064 He was a moneylender who burdened people with usurious loans, metaphorically chained to their death. 286 00:36:29,800.064 --> 00:36:35,210.064 In death, Marley is burdened to carry the weight that he once put on others. 287 00:36:35,510.064 --> 00:36:41,340.064 Marley's chains made more heavy by the padlocked places where he held their money. 288 00:36:42,340.064 --> 00:36:53,35.064 The ghosts tell Scrooge, It is required of every man that the spirit within him should walk abroad amongst his fellow man and travel far and wide. 289 00:36:53,165.064 --> 00:36:58,365.0645 If that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death. 290 00:36:58,975.0645 --> 00:37:07,315.0645 It is doomed to wander through the world and woe is me and witness what it can no longer share, but might have shared on earth. 291 00:37:07,785.0645 --> 00:37:09,195.0645 And turn to happiness. 292 00:37:10,675.0645 --> 00:37:20,645.0645 This passage almost certainly draws from the ghost of Hamlet's father and what he tells Hamlet of the afterlife. 293 00:37:21,505.0635 --> 00:37:25,705.0635 I am thy father's spirit doomed for a certain term to walk the night. 294 00:37:26,325.0645 --> 00:37:33,775.0645 And for the day confined to fast and fires till the foul crimes done in my days of nature are burnt and purged away. 295 00:37:34,445.0645 --> 00:37:43,155.0635 But that I am forbid to tell the secrets of my prison house, I could tell a tale unfold whose lightest words would harrow up thy soul. 296 00:37:43,530.0645 --> 00:37:45,570.0645 Freeze thy young blood. 297 00:37:46,250.0645 --> 00:37:49,380.0645 For me the key phrase is certain term. 298 00:37:49,710.0645 --> 00:37:53,130.0645 In purgatory, unlike heaven and hell, the passage of time exists. 299 00:37:53,350.0635 --> 00:37:59,260.0645 In heaven and hell, the spirits do not feel the passage of time because the punishments and the rewards are eternal. 300 00:37:59,780.0645 --> 00:38:08,915.0645 In purgatory, however, Feeling the passage of time is part of the suffering that purges the soul of sin and prepares it for paradise. 301 00:38:09,345.0645 --> 00:38:14,465.0645 As I said up front, the Hamlet illusion isn't an accident, it's actually key to the story. 302 00:38:15,5.0645 --> 00:38:21,215.0635 We don't know that Shakespeare read Dante because the Divine Comedy had not yet been translated to English. 303 00:38:21,525.0635 --> 00:38:55,280.0645 But Shakespeare is very clearly processing the Catholic Protestant divide on the doctrine of Purgatory, which was heavily influenced really to the point of canonization by Dante's work and the idea of the spiritual guide that the path Through the past is a Dante idea The metaphor of marley's punishment is very much like Dante's constructions which Shakespeare doesn't copy with the king's ghost suggesting the dickens drew from both Shakespeare and Dante For this construction of Marley's ghost. 304 00:38:56,820.0645 --> 00:39:08,720.0645 However, one key difference is that Dante's ghosts do not walk the earth, but Dante's ideas that sinners are combined to the places of their sin is a key piece of Scrooge's later epiphany. 305 00:39:09,390.0645 --> 00:39:14,530.0645 Here, Marley says that my spirit never walked beyond our counting house. 306 00:39:14,540.0645 --> 00:39:16,360.0645 Mark me in life. 307 00:39:16,390.0645 --> 00:39:23,980.0645 My spirit never robed beyond the narrow limits of our money changing hole and weary journeys lie before me. 308 00:39:24,785.0645 --> 00:39:33,355.0645 This is where Dickens earlier descriptions of the tall city buildings, the narrow alleyways, and the frozen fog fits thematically. 309 00:39:33,725.0635 --> 00:39:39,55.0645 The claustrophobia of the city mirrors the lack of empathy of those who live and work there. 310 00:39:39,435.0645 --> 00:39:46,685.0655 If you never leave Cornhill, and the shadow of the banks, you do not experience the misery that those debts impose on people. 311 00:39:47,210.0655 --> 00:39:54,970.0655 You can even zoom out and apply this idea to England, or the Bank of England's war crimes committed in far flung colonies. 312 00:39:55,670.0655 --> 00:40:01,370.0645 And this was one of Charles Dickens most deeply held beliefs, that travel creates empathy. 313 00:40:01,510.0655 --> 00:40:10,950.066 Not just travel in the large sense, even though Dickens was one of England's most prominent Francophiles, he toured America twice, he did travel journalism in Italy. 314 00:40:11,640.066 --> 00:40:17,190.066 But more than that, Dickens walked the streets of London during the night. 315 00:40:17,200.065 --> 00:40:20,480.065 He would sometimes walk 20 miles at a time. 316 00:40:21,540.066 --> 00:40:25,90.066 He visited prisons, workhouses, cemeteries. 317 00:40:25,240.066 --> 00:40:30,860.065 He was a journalist by nature and by training, and he always went to the source. 318 00:40:31,670.066 --> 00:40:40,610.066 So later in this story, the ghost of Christmas present whisks Scrooge through the air all across England so that he can see the poverty and misery. 319 00:40:41,90.066 --> 00:40:50,710.065 The story structure also mirrors Dickens narrative technique in which his omniscient narrator takes a god like view, then takes the narration camera down into the action. 320 00:40:51,200.065 --> 00:40:58,105.066 And so Marley's sentence is apparently, Carrying his change to witness the poverty and the misery that he spread. 321 00:40:59,95.066 --> 00:41:07,810.066 The man who was chained to his desk in life is forced to walk unceasingly in death to see the world beyond his office. 322 00:41:07,810.066 --> 00:41:11,225.066 The lesson that he has to learn. 323 00:41:11,600.066 --> 00:41:23,10.066 is that mankind was my business, the common welfare was my business, charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were all my business. 324 00:41:23,650.066 --> 00:41:31,420.066 And for Marley, this lack of empathy and connection was personal, which is why he's here to visit his partner. 325 00:41:32,540.066 --> 00:41:40,40.066 The ghost of Marley says to Ebenezer, I have sat invisible beside you, many and many a day. 326 00:41:40,970.066 --> 00:41:49,270.066 That is no light part of my penance, to warn you that you have yet a chance and hope of escaping my fate. 327 00:41:50,400.066 --> 00:41:59,645.066 The ghost of Marley, then tells Scrooge that he must endure visits from three ghosts, without which, You cannot hope to shun the path I tread. 328 00:42:00,865.066 --> 00:42:04,535.066 Marley's ghost walked to the window, and Scrooge looks out. 329 00:42:04,965.066 --> 00:42:12,805.066 He sees the air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, moaning as they went. 330 00:42:13,205.066 --> 00:42:15,985.065 And Scrooge knew all of these phantoms. 331 00:42:16,135.065 --> 00:42:21,335.065 They were dead souls chained together, linked together like guilty governments. 332 00:42:21,335.165 --> 00:42:24,985.066 These specters then fade into the mist. 333 00:42:25,415.066 --> 00:42:33,125.066 The fog returns, and Scrooge falls asleep with his time bound appointments with the spirits already set. 334 00:42:34,75.066 --> 00:42:38,285.066 One final note, a great performance of Scrooge requires a hint of humor. 335 00:42:39,415.066 --> 00:42:49,85.066 We need to develop some empathy for Scrooge, to connect with him on a human level, and to sense the charisma that he once had, which flintiness all the worse. 336 00:42:49,635.066 --> 00:42:58,880.066 And Dickens does give Scrooge some laugh lines, you know, telling Marley that, He might be imagining the ghost because of some undigested beef. 337 00:42:58,880.066 --> 00:43:06,420.066 And here he tells Marley, couldn't I just take them all at once and have it over Jacob next time. 338 00:43:06,930.066 --> 00:43:08,410.065 The first of the three spirits. 339 00:43:08,720.066 --> 00:43:09,920.065 Thank you for listening. 340 00:43:09,980.066 --> 00:43:12,730.066 And I'll see you next time with the ghost of Christmas past.
Hello and welcome to Living Literature.
Today I will walk you through stave one of A Christmas Carol, paragraph by paragraph.
The idea here is not to bog you down with minutiae and allusions, but to give you a, first, a broad framework for more deeply understanding Carol as a literary work. 4 00:00:43,9.999 --> 00:00:48,270 And second, to give you some context for some of the details that will really help illuminate the work.
(00:48):
And hopefully this will make your reading of A Christmas Carol more rewarding and cast this familiar work in a new light.
So, to that end, my framework for understanding the Christmas Carol is admittedly a bit speculative on my part.
I will help you envision Scrooge's London and his encounter with Marley's ghost as a vision of purgatory.
(01:12):
Purgatory.
.999In medieval Christian and later Catholic belief, Purgatory is an intermediate afterlife space where souls are purified before entering heaven.
.999Purgatory doesn't really exist in most Protestant belief systems.
.999It's called Hades by the Lutherans, for example, but it's not a place where sins are purged from the soul.
(01:33):
Over time, Dante's vision of Purgatory had come to define it almost like canon.
The Divine Comedy isn't just Dante's Inferno.
.999The Inferno is just one part where Virgil guides Dante through the circles of hell.
Purgatorio is part two where later and at the end, Beatrice guides Dante through the circles of Purgatory.
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Where souls are bound for a certain time to do penance for a certain punishment, the length of which is determined by the severity of their sin and the sinner's level of contrition.
We'll flesh this idea out as we go, but just know this, purgatory is time bound.
Physically confining and the seven deadly sins of purgatory are some sort of betrayal of true love. 19 00:02:24,334.999 --> 00:02:37,385 You do your punishment in purgatory, cleansing your soul of wrath, envy, pride, sloth, lust, gluttony, greed, and then you emerge at the top of the mountain ready to enter paradise.
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And so a Christmas Carol, like the Divine Comedy, is a story in a condensed time frame where a sinner is guided by a ghostly figure in a tripartite structure to deeply interrogate the nature of sin and true Christian meaning.
Now, the only scholar I've found who has written on this connection is Professor Stephen Burtman at the University of Windsor in Windsor, Ontario, in a 2007 article called Dante's role in the genesis of Dickens A Christmas Carol from Dickens Quarterly.
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Professor Burtman deep dives into evidence of Dickens knowledge of Dante, that certain books were found in Dickens libraries at his various homes, but most intriguingly, we know that the most prevalent translation of the Divine Comedy into English at the time was by a man named Henry Francis Carey, who was an assistant librarian in the British Museum at the time when A quote, young Dickens was frequently it's reading room as a cub reporter intent on enlarging his mind.
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In other words, Charles Dickens spent a lot of time when he was early in his career as a young reporter in the British Museum educating himself on the greats of literature.
And there's no proof of the two's meeting, but considering the circumstances, it seems very likely that, even if they did not meet, Dickens would have been familiar with his work on Dante.
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Dickens was extremely well read, especially of the great classics, and when you consider that some very specific lines from Scrooge are very similar to lines in the Divine Comedy, The similarities in the physical descriptions of Satan and Scrooge are uncanny.
I'm just going to say that that Dante was a major influence on A Christmas Carol. 27 00:04:33,800.001 --> 00:04:39,720.001 And I hope that this framing will help you understand the religiosity of the story. 28 00:04:42,300.001 --> 00:04:47,570.001 All right, so let's open with Dickens as narrator. 29 00:04:47,830.001 --> 00:04:50,60.001 If we go to the preface, C. 30 00:04:50,60.001 --> 00:04:50,430.001 D., 31 00:04:50,450.001 --> 00:05:04,640.001 as Dickens always signed his book, says, I have endeavored in this ghostly little book to raise the ghost of an idea, which shall not put my readers out of humor with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. 32 00:05:05,50.001 --> 00:05:09,530.001 May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it. 33 00:05:10,0.001 --> 00:05:12,410.001 So here, Dickens establishes two things. 34 00:05:12,430.001 --> 00:05:15,930.001 First, this is a ghost story. 35 00:05:16,190.001 --> 00:05:23,480.001 It is supernatural, and it is not intended to scare or to scold, but to haunt pleasantly.
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dear reader, no matter how unpleasant this first stave might be, all will be well in the end.
So, you don't have to risk getting upset with me, dear reader, I am telling you a story with a happy ending.
Merry Christmas.
.999And second, it is I, your faithful friend and servant, one Charles Dickens, who will be your guide. 40 00:05:50,299.999 --> 00:06:02,480 And this is important because the Christmas Carol is written in something like first person omniscient, where he, Charles Dickens is the narrator of the story.
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.9And this was not just a, device, but an essential part of the Dickens brand that he employed over and over again, Dickens was deeply involved in the business of publishing and he fought with his publishers all the time, including, starting his own literary magazine and going out on his own.
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to publish a tale of two cities in 1859 it was deeply important to Dickens that his identity was portable and unique to him so when you buy a subscription to a literary magazine Dickens didn't want you to experience a Chapman and Hall publication as much as he wanted you to feel like Charles Dickens is there with you in your sitting room sharing a story with you.
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This personal connection was not just Dickens's way of telling the story, but it was his way of building a relationship directly with you.
And so his writer's voice is much better understood as a script.
Indeed, later in life, Dickens made most of his money performing his own scripts based on his books.
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It was almost like the literature was created for the performances.
Dickens basically invented the book tour, and it was great business for him. 48 00:07:27,239.999 --> 00:07:32,100 But as a literary matter, if you find Dickens hard to slog through, you're not alone.
.999Dickens is best enjoyed aloud, and that's why I think A Christmas Carol works so well on the stage, where a Dickens stand in like Gonzo in A Muppet Christmas Carol performs lines from the text, sometimes as Dickens. 50 00:07:46,794.999 --> 00:07:53,414.999 Dickens himself, he considered himself an actor, and he wrote for professional actors to perform. 51 00:07:53,415.099 --> 00:08:02,874.999 He published serially, where his works were read aloud in pubs and ale houses performed by the dockmen who could read and love to ham it up.
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So, Dickens omniscient narration is also very important to his structure.
Dickens stories jump from place to place.
Like a Baz Luhrmann film where the camera can be backstage at an opera and then fly out of the window above the great city and then swoop down to another part of the city to find a man walking, into the great city at night.
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.9995Dickens very much wrote cinematically. 56 00:08:32,154.9995 --> 00:08:52,100 Dickens ahead of his time with deeply descriptive visual passages and atmospherics that's like handwritten cinematography and a narration camera that in this story literally flies Scrooge across England so that he can see the effects of dire poverty on the people.
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So let's now get to And there's a lot to cover on the first page because Dickens lays down a lot of context.
He basically gives you the point of the story up front and then starts the narrative.
In his first paragraphs, Dickens often uses unusual punctuation that point you directly to the point.
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.001Here, Dickens opens a Christmas Carol with Marley was dead, colon, space, space to begin with. 61 00:09:28,500.001 --> 00:09:30,320.001 That colon is important. 62 00:09:31,70.001 --> 00:09:37,510.001 Here, it's that, to begin with, we need you to know that Marley is dead. 63 00:09:37,850.001 --> 00:09:40,470.001 This is a ghost story. 64 00:09:40,700.001 --> 00:09:42,970.001 It involves the supernatural. 65 00:09:43,230.001 --> 00:09:46,410.001 It is spiritual in nature. 66 00:09:47,110.001 --> 00:09:49,940.001 Scrooge is not imagining Marley. 67 00:09:50,70.001 --> 00:09:51,560.001 There's no prank here. 68 00:09:52,100.001 --> 00:09:57,450.001 And thus, Dickens wants to establish the religiosity of a Christmas carol. 69 00:09:57,980.001 --> 00:10:01,890 Thus, Marley is dead as a doornail. 70 00:10:02,660.001 --> 00:10:06,794.901 Dead as a doornail is a funny phrase that extends back to Shakespeare's time. 71 00:10:06,985.001 --> 00:10:15,385.001 Long story short, nails used to be handmade and very sturdy, often repurposed from project to project over decades or even over centuries.
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.001But door nails would hold together wood from both sides of the door. 73 00:10:21,595.001 --> 00:10:28,475.001 So the nail would be driven all the way through, then bent near the tip and then hammered into the door like a staple. 74 00:10:28,865.001 --> 00:10:34,455 And thus that nail door nails could not be repurposed for another project. 75 00:10:35,115.001 --> 00:10:37,175.001 The nail doesn't have another life. 76 00:10:38,5.001 --> 00:10:38,845.001 It is dead. 77 00:10:39,665.001 --> 00:10:54,615.001 So that history of dead as a doornail phrase sets up the joke in the second paragraph where Dickens says, the wisdom of the ancestors is in the simile, and my unhallowed hand shall not disturb it, or the country's done for. 78 00:10:54,865.001 --> 00:11:01,705.001 This is a joke that Dickens makes very often, that England is old and stodgy and traditional and. 79 00:11:01,740.001 --> 00:11:02,170.001 Dark. 80 00:11:02,170.001 --> 00:11:03,970.001 Our practices don't make any sense. 81 00:11:04,260.001 --> 00:11:05,810.001 Everything is inconvenient. 82 00:11:06,100.001 --> 00:11:13,880.001 And if we change anything, the entire country will fall apart and Englishness will cease to be. 83 00:11:14,470.001 --> 00:11:27,340.001 So this is Dickens expressing the irony of English conservatism in the classic sense, which moves us into the third paragraph, which, requires a little bit of speculation. 84 00:11:28,390.001 --> 00:11:38,710 What was the relationship between Scrooge and Marley? Obviously they were partners, and there wasn't really any hint of anything beyond that. 85 00:11:39,180.001 --> 00:11:46,714.901 We'll see later that there is some suggestion that Marley was older than Scrooge, and yet the firm's name was Scrooge and Marley. 86 00:11:49,55.001 --> 00:12:02,825.001 Dickens does his repeating of language thing to make the point that Scrooge was the sole executor, listed first, sole administrator, sole assigned, sole residituary, legatee, sole friend, and sole mourner. 87 00:12:03,85.002 --> 00:12:04,419.902 Marley had it. 88 00:12:04,850.002 --> 00:12:06,270.002 Nobody else. 89 00:12:07,160.002 --> 00:12:17,720.002 So is this why Scrooge sought him as a partner? Did he forge this partnership for the inheritance? I mean, we know that Marley also left Scrooge his house. 90 00:12:17,840.002 --> 00:12:24,89.902 Which even in 1843 would have been a very valuable piece of City of London real estate. 91 00:12:24,750.002 --> 00:12:28,680.002 And as we'll see, Scrooge was very much afraid of debt. 92 00:12:29,330.002 --> 00:12:45,350.002 There's very little else about the nature of their relationship, but it does seem like Scrooge set himself up with the exact opposite kind of partnership than was proposed to him by his fiancée Belle, who we will meet in Stave 2. 93 00:12:45,530.002 --> 00:12:47,60.002 And we'll talk about this later. 94 00:12:48,470.002 --> 00:12:52,805.002 Now, On to paragraph four in The Illusion to Hamlet. 95 00:12:53,675.002 --> 00:13:00,435.002 In Dickens original handwritten manuscript, he crosses out a large part of the end of this paragraph. 96 00:13:00,845.001 --> 00:13:30,335.001 In his introduction to the original manuscript edition of A Christmas Carol, where you can read the printed text alongside Dickens handwriting, Declan Kiley, the former curator at the Morgan Library, which owns Dickens A Christmas Carol manuscript, writes that, The ghost of Hamlet's father is introduced, leading to a digression concerning the character of Hamlet that Dickens seems to have immediately recognized as superfluous and potentially distracting from the scenario he was establishing. 97 00:13:31,435.002 --> 00:13:32,865.002 I disagree. 98 00:13:33,635.002 --> 00:13:42,405.002 This goes back to my impression of Dante's Influence on Dickens. 99 00:13:42,595.002 --> 00:13:47,945.002 Because in Hamlet, the ghost of Hamlet's father appears to Prince Hamlet. 100 00:13:48,385.002 --> 00:13:51,505.002 Doomed for a certain term to walk the night. 101 00:13:51,835.001 --> 00:13:54,915.002 And for the day confined to fast and fires. 102 00:13:54,935.002 --> 00:13:59,255.001 Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature are burnt and purged away. 103 00:13:59,890.002 --> 00:14:03,880.002 But, that I am forbid to tell the secrets of my prison house. 104 00:14:04,190.002 --> 00:14:10,390.002 I could a tale unfold whose lightest word would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood. 105 00:14:11,320.001 --> 00:14:16,350.002 And this is very much a description of purgatory. 106 00:14:16,850.001 --> 00:14:21,860.002 The spirit from beyond, warning of how sins in the world will doom you. 107 00:14:22,340.002 --> 00:14:51,235.002 But you walk for a certain term it is time bound to a kind of hell until your crimes are purged Hamlet the play was written around 1600 toward the end of the reign of Elizabeth I whose father Henry VIII separated England from the Catholic Church and created the Protestant Church of England Which has traditionally defied the existence of purgatory. 108 00:14:51,785.002 --> 00:14:56,225.002 So Shakespeare wrote Hamlet in a time of doctrinal confusion. 109 00:14:56,235.002 --> 00:15:16,200.001 Like, do we not believe in purgatory now? Because the king wanted a divorce? And in the play, Prince Hamlet was sent to college in Wittenberg, the home of none other than Martin Luther, who tacked up his 95 theses 83 years before Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. 110 00:15:16,880.002 --> 00:15:23,220.002 So part of the spiritual conflict of this play is this very sudden change in doctrine. 111 00:15:23,960.002 --> 00:15:26,970.002 Prince Hamlet is being raised and educated. 112 00:15:27,45.002 --> 00:15:29,525.002 Explicitly as a protestant king. 113 00:15:29,625.002 --> 00:15:51,955.002 That's why he's being sent to wittenberg But he very much seems to have a catholic soul not just in his fixation on guilt But in his open acceptance of the idea that his father's spirit must be released from purgatory I was raised protestant but taught in catholic school So I understand this conflict and i've often sensed it in dickens. 114 00:15:52,115.002 --> 00:16:02,145.002 We know that dickens was a deeply spiritual man But he despised human Institutions and so priests of all sorts are the villains in his stories. 115 00:16:02,255.002 --> 00:16:05,655.002 He was not a doctrinal Anglican. 116 00:16:06,625.002 --> 00:16:15,645.001 Thematically his fiction fixates on guilt, forgiveness, absolution, very catholic ideas. 117 00:16:15,645.001 --> 00:16:26,425.001 Nowhere does he suggest that say the human act of baptism for instance is any way a substitute for individual acts to make your wrongs. 118 00:16:27,945.002 --> 00:16:31,245.002 That's why I think this allusion to Hamlet's father is a big deal. 119 00:16:31,435.002 --> 00:16:33,975.002 And why it helps us understand the story. 120 00:16:34,335.002 --> 00:16:39,275.002 Dickens loved Shakespeare and he was always working towards Shakespeare's reputation. 121 00:16:39,285.002 --> 00:16:48,765.0015 He would have been finally attuned to this reading of Shakespeare and establishes up front that these ghosts are like the ghosts in Shakespeare. 122 00:16:48,765.0015 --> 00:16:50,955.0015 So now we get our first glimpse of Scrooge. 123 00:16:50,995.0015 --> 00:16:53,735.0015 A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping. 124 00:16:54,210.0015 --> 00:16:56,70.0015 Clutching, covetous old sinner. 125 00:16:56,480.0015 --> 00:17:04,560.0015 And sinner, I think, here's the key word, which emphasizes Dickens conception that this is, above all else, a Christian story. 126 00:17:05,70.0015 --> 00:17:22,850.0015 There's, the other piece of this is how cold Scrooge is, not just in personality, where no beggars implored him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him, it was o'clock, but how physically cold, the cold, bleak, biting weather was. 127 00:17:23,555.0015 --> 00:17:36,845.0005 This, again, is where we see the influence of Dante, not just the influence of Dante's ideas of purgatory on Shakespeare's writing, but in the Inferno, Satan isn't engulfed by hellfire. 128 00:17:38,355.0015 --> 00:17:42,75.0005 He is encased in ice up to his waist. 129 00:17:42,315.0005 --> 00:17:44,5.0015 Satan is cold. 130 00:17:44,215.0015 --> 00:17:53,595.0005 And in the words of Dante's scholar, Rachel Jacob, the deepest isolation is to suffer separation from the source of all light in life. 131 00:17:55,770.0015 --> 00:18:00,360.0015 Think of every movie adaptation of A Christmas Carol you've ever seen. 132 00:18:00,720.0015 --> 00:18:05,160.0005 The tall buildings at the very center of the city of London shadowing out the sun. 133 00:18:05,500.0015 --> 00:18:10,40.0005 The fog settling into the narrow streets between the banks and the counting houses. 134 00:18:10,300.0015 --> 00:18:14,140.0015 The small fires built in alleyways to provide small warmth. 135 00:18:14,610.0015 --> 00:18:24,340.0015 Where this dark cloaked, shriveled man walks the urban streets with, in Dickens words, No eye at all is better than evil eyed Dark Master. 136 00:18:24,355.1015 --> 00:18:37,145.0015 This is Scrooge's London, towards the end of the Little Ice Age, where the Thames froze solid every year until the pollution became so bad that it changed the composition of the water. 137 00:18:37,905.0015 --> 00:18:43,695.0015 So, in this context, the city blocks had only just gone three. 138 00:18:43,735.0015 --> 00:18:45,755.0005 It had not been light all day. 139 00:18:46,75.0015 --> 00:18:57,365.0015 The fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole and was so dense without that, although the court was of the narrowest, the houses opposite were mere phantoms. 140 00:18:58,245.0015 --> 00:19:01,454.9015 With Dickens, the fog is always there. 141 00:19:02,845.0015 --> 00:19:10,845.0005 In every Dickens story, where the London Fog sits on the city, expect the banality of evil. 142 00:19:11,225.0015 --> 00:19:18,865.0015 Not fire breathing revolutionaries, but the evil of lawyers, priests, schoolmasters, and moneylenders. 143 00:19:19,485.0005 --> 00:19:24,265.0015 Inside Scrooge's office, the clerk's fire had one coal. 144 00:19:24,415.0015 --> 00:19:35,455.0015 And as a quick aside, much of The London fog of this time was indeed smog because the constant burning of coal is how London became the big smoke. 145 00:19:36,805.0015 --> 00:19:41,635.0015 And so, at this point, in walks Scrooge's nephew Fred. 146 00:19:42,45.0005 --> 00:19:45,275.0015 A Merry Christmas, Uncle, and God save you, cried a cheery voice. 147 00:19:46,55.0015 --> 00:19:50,985.0015 And now, before we get to Bah Humbug, let's think a little on Scrooge's family. 148 00:19:51,425.0015 --> 00:20:03,800.0015 In Stave 2, we will learn That young Ebenezer was hated by his father, but his sister Fann convinced him to let Ebenezer come home for Christmas from boarding school, probably for good. 149 00:20:04,580.0015 --> 00:20:07,750.0015 But Fann also died giving birth to Fred. 150 00:20:08,10.0015 --> 00:20:17,520.0015 And we'll get to all of this in stave 2, but for now, it's enough to know that Scrooge's nephew just wants to connect with what little family he has. 151 00:20:17,810.0015 --> 00:20:24,250.0005 But doing so would force Ebenezer to confront his sadness and anger about the loss. 152 00:20:27,140.0015 --> 00:20:30,690.0015 So, for Scrooge, Christmas is here. 153 00:20:31,65.0015 --> 00:20:32,785.0015 is humbug. 154 00:20:33,395.0015 --> 00:20:49,45.0005 For this section, I am borrowing from the work of Richard Jones, a blue badge tour guide in London who specializes in historical tours, Dickens in particular, and I've taken his tours and once as part of the Dickens symposium, and I can personally attest that Richard is fine company to enjoy a pint with. 155 00:20:50,290.0015 --> 00:20:55,320.0015 Today, almost any use of humbug alludes to a Christmas carol. 156 00:20:56,990.0015 --> 00:21:03,610.0015 The word was prominent in the 1700s, even used as a verb, humbugging, to describe jokes and tall tales. 157 00:21:03,880.0015 --> 00:21:08,620.0005 There was even a play called The Humors of Humbug, featuring the character Harry Humbug. 158 00:21:09,40.0015 --> 00:21:14,440.0015 But over time, humbug became a political insult, to describe frauds on the public. 159 00:21:14,620.0015 --> 00:21:19,180.0015 That new salt tax they said wouldn't raise the price of food? The people have been humbugged. 160 00:21:19,420.0015 --> 00:21:24,390.0015 The lawyer who charges you for unnecessary court proceedings, he humbugged you. 161 00:21:25,250.0015 --> 00:21:33,760.0015 By the 1830s, humbug was applied widely to lying, deceitful politicians, especially members of parliament. 162 00:21:34,240.0005 --> 00:21:38,650.0015 Lord Cursley's speech about how much he cares for the poor, That's humbug. 163 00:21:39,30.0015 --> 00:21:44,990.0015 And remember, Dickens got his start in journalism as a parliamentary reporter. 164 00:21:44,990.0015 --> 00:21:56,0.0015 So humbug would have been a very common word for Dickens and his readers would have immediately grasped that Scrooge is saying to his nephew that Christmas is a fraud upon the public. 165 00:21:56,60.0015 --> 00:21:59,290.0015 It is a deceit and that he wants no part of this. 166 00:22:00,355.0015 --> 00:22:09,555.0015 Which is why Scrooge tells his nephew after Fred gives his speech about the Christmas spirit that I wonder you don't go into Parliament. 167 00:22:10,515.0005 --> 00:22:15,905.0015 So to Scrooge, what else is humbug? Marriage. 168 00:22:16,445.0015 --> 00:22:23,145.0015 And so when Scrooge asks Fred why he got married, his nephew says, Because I fell in love. 169 00:22:23,595.0015 --> 00:22:32,45.0015 And for Ebenezer, the only thing in the world more ridiculous than that, Christmas. 170 00:22:32,515.0015 --> 00:22:38,655.0015 This is a key point that we will return to and stay to with the ghost of Christmas past. 171 00:22:40,185.0015 --> 00:22:48,775.0015 Now, this brings us to the entry of the two gentlemen of charity, but let's pause for a moment and think about Scrooge's company. 172 00:22:49,775.0015 --> 00:22:50,475.0015 This is important. 173 00:22:50,485.0015 --> 00:22:52,915.0015 Let's figure out exactly what Scrooge does. 174 00:22:53,395.0015 --> 00:22:59,805.0005 In the 1840s, Scrooge's piece of the City of London was home to finance related offices. 175 00:23:00,65.0015 --> 00:23:05,485.0005 A few blocks away sits the Bank of England and Mansion House, the real centers of power and wealth. 176 00:23:05,825.0005 --> 00:23:11,685.0015 We are about 30 years past the defeat of Napoleon, which elevated Britain to global supremacy. 177 00:23:12,145.0015 --> 00:23:15,615.0015 Dickens wrote Carol at the rise of the British century. 178 00:23:15,945.0015 --> 00:23:18,485.0015 Pax Britannia's control of the seas. 179 00:23:18,705.0015 --> 00:23:22,775.0015 Nothing on the globe happened without the British touching it in one way or another. 180 00:23:23,375.0015 --> 00:23:32,345.0015 And it was here in this tiny square mile of the city of London was where nearly all world finance was moved. 181 00:23:32,585.0015 --> 00:23:38,425.0015 Right here in Scrooge's London was where wealth was invested in the British Raj of India. 182 00:23:38,665.0015 --> 00:23:48,105.0015 The colonization of New Zealand and the other and other islands in the Pacific, the occupation of Egypt to eventually build a canal there that would have shipping time to the far east. 183 00:23:48,395.0015 --> 00:23:55,165.0005 The great game of European domination waged against Russia and where the scramble for Africa began. 184 00:23:56,80.0015 --> 00:24:07,400.0015 It was also here where the wealth extracted from the people of those lands was laundered into the accounts of the British aristocracy and its investors. 185 00:24:07,870.0015 --> 00:24:13,315.0015 In a separate article, I will tell you about how in this way we can read That how Mr. 186 00:24:13,325.0015 --> 00:24:19,585.0015 George Banks paid for 17 Cherry Tree Lane and the services of his nanny, Mary Poppins, with plundered wealth. 187 00:24:20,875.0015 --> 00:24:24,485.0005 But Scrooge was not a banker on that scale. 188 00:24:25,185.0015 --> 00:24:31,235.0005 Rather, Scrooge seems to be a best in class, but still somewhat small time money lender. 189 00:24:31,465.0015 --> 00:24:34,775.0015 Perhaps the equivalent of a payday loan shark today. 190 00:24:35,555.0015 --> 00:24:47,125.0015 This was a time of the debtor's prisons, where debt was criminalized and people of all classes could be incarcerated for owning private entities money and not to go too deep into the history. 191 00:24:47,125.0015 --> 00:24:50,675.0015 But this is why bankruptcy law was enshrined in the American Constitution. 192 00:24:50,865.0015 --> 00:24:55,25.0005 Many of the early colonists came to America to escape incarceration for debts. 193 00:24:55,765.0015 --> 00:24:58,835.0015 Scrooge made his money from the poor. 194 00:24:58,995.0005 --> 00:25:07,900.0015 But history also tells us that during this time, The rise of the bourgeois middle class resulted in a lot of bourgeois overspending. 195 00:25:08,250.0015 --> 00:25:22,10.0015 Dickens father, for instance, had a decent government job and Dickens himself always struggled with money, but he overspent on houses, on a lifestyle, and on just playing the character of Charles Dickens in real life. 196 00:25:22,640.0015 --> 00:25:29,200.0015 So, Dickens positions Scrooge as a moneylender, one of the worst sinners in the Bible. 197 00:25:30,780.0015 --> 00:25:36,230.0015 The only time that the Lord used the whip was to drive the moneylenders away from the church. 198 00:25:36,400.0015 --> 00:25:38,440.0015 And thus, is Scrooge. 199 00:25:39,860.0015 --> 00:25:50,620.0015 And so, what is Scrooge's plan? Well, it's unclear whether Scrooge's contempt for the poor drove his choice of profession or vice versa. 200 00:25:50,930.0015 --> 00:25:54,630.0005 But Scrooge's contempt for the poor is a political question. 201 00:25:55,120.0005 --> 00:26:09,965.0015 This is the famous line where Scrooge says to the charity men, Are there no prisons? And the union workhouses, are they still in operation? The treadmill and the poor law are in full vigor then? And the men of charity say, look, people would rather die than go there. 202 00:26:10,565.0015 --> 00:26:16,595.0015 And Scrooge replies, if they would rather die, they had better do it and decrease the surplus population. 203 00:26:17,265.0015 --> 00:26:23,645.0005 A line that comes back to haunt Scrooge when the ghost of Christmas present shows him. 204 00:26:23,710.0015 --> 00:26:24,490.0015 Tiny Tim. 205 00:26:26,280.0015 --> 00:26:37,600.0015 This line is a direct quote from the works of English economists, the Reverend Thomas Robert Malus, whose work became known as the Malthusian Trap. 206 00:26:38,20.0015 --> 00:26:50,530.0015 The idea that increasing a nation's food production would eventually lead to a decrease in living standards because the resulting population growth would lead to food shortages. 207 00:26:51,335.0015 --> 00:26:54,355.0015 For Malthus, this created a spiritual problem. 208 00:26:54,915.0015 --> 00:27:03,425.0015 If population growth thwarts social progress, it's imperative for a nation to impose standards of virtue on its people. 209 00:27:03,955.0005 --> 00:27:12,585.0015 Being poor and hungry was the result of individual vice and wastefulness, not national policies or macroeconomics. 210 00:27:13,205.0015 --> 00:27:16,545.0015 Not that Malthus didn't have views on economic policies. 211 00:27:16,545.0015 --> 00:27:20,705.0015 He thought the poor laws created inflation, which hurt the virtuous well off. 212 00:27:20,895.0005 --> 00:27:25,895.0015 And he supported the corn laws, which taxed grain imports and spiked the price of bread. 213 00:27:27,135.0015 --> 00:27:37,245.0015 If the poor died because they couldn't afford food, well, they could have just avoided all the vice and wastefulness that put them in this situation. 214 00:27:37,665.0015 --> 00:27:43,530.0015 If that led to mass death, well, that's just the Surplus population. 215 00:27:44,90.0015 --> 00:27:50,320.0005 Their own vice and wastefulness dictated their own fate, and they would be judged accordingly by God. 216 00:27:51,400.0015 --> 00:27:54,180.0005 Malthus was controversial in his own lifetime. 217 00:27:54,520.0015 --> 00:28:11,760.0005 In An Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus said that Rousseau's views on income inequality and romantic individualism defied mathematical logic, that population increases exponentially, while food supply only increases linearly. 218 00:28:12,365.0015 --> 00:28:25,25.0015 And Malthus also beefed with William Godwin, the utilitarian and anarchist philosopher who was married to early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, whose daughter later became Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. 219 00:28:25,475.0005 --> 00:28:34,80.0015 Godwin was an early proponent of utilitarianism, But Malthus thought that the greatest happiness for the greatest number would lead to famine. 220 00:28:35,300.0015 --> 00:28:41,530.0015 This is the man that Dickens used as a model for Scrooge's politics. 221 00:28:42,0.0015 --> 00:28:44,720.0015 The poor are poor because they lack virtue. 222 00:28:44,870.0015 --> 00:28:52,920.0015 And if they die, well get on with it because the surplus population is taking food from the virtuous. 223 00:28:56,800.0015 --> 00:29:05,885.0015 Now, this leads us to The charity men leaving and Dickens shows us the city of London for the first time. 224 00:29:05,885.0015 --> 00:29:12,895.0005 And so let's talk about the city of London as a metaphor and a classic Dickens faction, the fog and darkness stick. 225 00:29:12,895.0015 --> 00:29:23,155.0015 And so that people ran about with flaring links with Dickens, the fog is always moral and he makes clear that what's about to happen to Scrooge. 226 00:29:23,205.0015 --> 00:29:29,265.0005 Isn't just about his individual acts, but about his politics as well. 227 00:29:30,185.064 --> 00:29:35,235.064 Here, Bob Cratchit asked for Christmas Day off, which Scrooge reluctantly relents to. 228 00:29:35,715.064 --> 00:29:39,875.064 When Bob leaves, he slides down Corn Hill 20 times before walking home. 229 00:29:40,65.063 --> 00:29:46,895.064 And Corn Hill is an actual hill, small hill, neighborhood just past Mansion House that Bob could have sled back in the day. 230 00:29:47,550.064 --> 00:29:58,70.064 But, and this is a detail that Dickens leaves out, Bob Cratchit's walk home would take about an hour and thirty minutes in the best of circumstances. 231 00:29:58,600.063 --> 00:30:05,890.063 The Cratchits live in Camden, a borough today most known for its punk scene back in the 70s and 80s. 232 00:30:06,180.063 --> 00:30:13,370.064 But in the 1840s though, it was a working class neighborhood, borderline slum, far away from the city of London itself. 233 00:30:14,110.064 --> 00:30:19,430.064 Dickens himself lived there when he was little during a time when his father was racked with debt. 234 00:30:19,700.064 --> 00:30:28,920.063 Today, there's even a blue plaque commemorating Dickens residence in Camden, which was almost surely a model for the Cratchit house. 235 00:30:29,510.064 --> 00:30:38,730.064 So, while Bob is setting off on his hour or two walk to go play blind man's bluff with his kids, Scrooge walks two minutes to the pub. 236 00:30:39,880.064 --> 00:30:43,630.064 In a separate post, I will take you through Scrooge's London by St. 237 00:30:43,640.064 --> 00:30:47,210.064 Michael's Church, whose shadows still today looms over Corn Hill. 238 00:30:47,890.064 --> 00:30:52,860.063 On his way, Scrooge sees ragged men and boys warming their hands by the fire. 239 00:30:52,940.064 --> 00:30:56,710.063 He walks by the church, down a narrow alley that's still there today. 240 00:30:56,920.063 --> 00:31:02,840.064 And when you're there, you can look up and imagine the frozen fog of a Christmas carol settling into the alley. 241 00:31:03,700.064 --> 00:31:10,500.064 in a very soup like manner before Scrooge takes his melancholy dinner in his melancholy tavern. 242 00:31:10,910.064 --> 00:31:12,960.064 This tavern, by the way, is still there. 243 00:31:13,150.064 --> 00:31:18,690.064 It's the George and Vulture which hosts various Dickens groups for pints and dinners. 244 00:31:20,325.064 --> 00:31:23,325.064 Now, let's talk about Marley's house. 245 00:31:24,315.064 --> 00:31:33,445.064 After Scrooge takes his dinner, Dickens gives up some rather intriguing details about Scrooge's deceased partner, Jacob Marley. 246 00:31:34,205.064 --> 00:31:40,45.063 Scrooge, apparently, inherited Marley's house, which is talked into a muse in the city of London. 247 00:31:40,515.064 --> 00:31:43,515.064 This would have been a very expensive piece of real estate. 248 00:31:44,385.064 --> 00:31:49,965.064 Scrooge would have already had dinner by the time Bob Cratchit made it back to Camden. 249 00:31:50,135.064 --> 00:31:58,205.063 This suggests that Marley had money, perhaps came from money, but had no family, or at least any that he would leave an inheritance to. 250 00:31:59,355.064 --> 00:32:02,255.064 Yet Scrooge's name was the first on the company door. 251 00:32:03,15.064 --> 00:32:13,455.064 And this house is big enough that Scrooge leveraged several extra rooms to rent as office space and the basement was rented to a wine merchant to hold his casks. 252 00:32:14,5.064 --> 00:32:18,815.064 In Scrooge's sitting room, Dickens details the old fireplace. 253 00:32:19,220.064 --> 00:32:28,550.064 Quote, built by some Dutch merchant long ago, paved all around with quaint Dutch tiles, designed to illustrate the scriptures. 254 00:32:29,430.063 --> 00:32:51,990.063 This Dutch detail is key, because it tells us that this house was once owned by a very rich merchant, probably from the Dutch East India Company from the Dutch Golden Age of the 1600s, when the Dutch Republic ruled the seas, dominating trade routes, The Atlantic slave trade, extensive colonial ventures, the world over. 255 00:32:52,240.063 --> 00:33:08,170.063 Now, London was still the financial center of the world, but in the very least, you would have had a population of rich Dutch merchants who could afford stairwells so wide that you could get a hearse up at broadwise broadwise. 256 00:33:08,750.063 --> 00:33:11,650.063 Dickens was very much aware of the influence of. 257 00:33:11,870.063 --> 00:33:13,720.063 Empire on this space. 258 00:33:14,370.063 --> 00:33:18,490.063 Marley's house is a serious piece of real estate. 259 00:33:19,200.063 --> 00:33:27,220.063 There's even a disused bell that hung in the room and communicated for some purpose, now forgotten with the change ber in the highest story of the building. 260 00:33:27,660.062 --> 00:33:35,490.063 This bell would have been used to summon servants, but Scrooge apparently is too cheap to employ them, and so he takes his little saucepan of gruel alone. 261 00:33:35,770.063 --> 00:33:38,80.063 No one else in this enormous house. 262 00:33:39,510.063 --> 00:33:52,530.063 So when Scrooge sees Marley's face on his doorknocker, Dickens said that Scrooge had not bestowed one thought on Marley since his last mention of his seven years dead partner that afternoon. 263 00:33:53,410.063 --> 00:33:57,760.062 Whatever happened to Marley, it seems like it was traumatic. 264 00:33:58,290.063 --> 00:34:04,260.063 And Scrooge reacts to it the same way that he reacted to the son of his dead sister. 265 00:34:04,710.063 --> 00:34:06,880.063 Shutting himself away from the world. 266 00:34:07,700.063 --> 00:34:11,780.063 Ebenezer Scrooge has suffered traumatic loss in his life. 267 00:34:11,930.063 --> 00:34:18,870.062 And this, for me, changes the traditional perception of Scrooge as just a plain old greedy miser. 268 00:34:19,500.063 --> 00:34:20,840.063 He's suffering from trauma. 269 00:34:21,340.063 --> 00:34:25,589.963 And we'll get to all of this with the Ghost of Christmas Past in Stave 2. 270 00:34:27,70.063 --> 00:34:30,20.063 And so now we get to the entry of Marley's Ghost. 271 00:34:31,490.063 --> 00:34:34,710.063 Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it. 272 00:34:35,170.063 --> 00:34:37,900.063 So Scrooge sits alone in his cheap darkness. 273 00:34:38,390.063 --> 00:34:40,810.063 Not a man to be frightened by echoes. 274 00:34:40,970.063 --> 00:34:44,20.113 As I talked about in, living literature episode 1. 275 00:34:44,20.113 --> 00:34:52,280.062 0, echoes is a metaphor that Dickens often employs to suggest that the distant past is now finally catching up to you in the present. 276 00:34:52,690.063 --> 00:34:58,750.064 Thus the ghost of Marley finds his way through the heavy door to Scrooge after double locking himself in. 277 00:34:59,780.064 --> 00:35:03,810.064 This, I think, is where we see more influence of Dante. 278 00:35:04,570.064 --> 00:35:13,440.064 Thus far, Dickens has described the city of London as a tiny enclosed space encased in a frozen fog, lighted only by small fires and gas lamps. 279 00:35:13,800.063 --> 00:35:27,169.964 In those hours, on Christmas Eve, where everything seems to shut down, as if we are suspended in an alternative universe that only happens once a year, and you really begin to feel it. 280 00:35:27,320.064 --> 00:36:06,420.064 feel the passage of time before church before dinner before gifts so the ghost of jacob marley body transparent but otherwise dressed as he was in life carrying a heavy chain made for cash boxes key padlocks ledgers deeds and heavy purses wrought in steel in the inferno and purgatorio Each sinner's punishment is a metaphorical representation of the sin itself so that the punishment is a perverse reenactment of that sin that you committed in life. 281 00:36:06,990.064 --> 00:36:09,890.063 Murderers stand in a river of boiling blood. 282 00:36:10,70.064 --> 00:36:14,610.064 Hypocrites wear robes that glitter on the outside but are weighted with lead underneath. 283 00:36:15,450.064 --> 00:36:20,990.064 And that is exactly what Dickens does with the ghost of Jacob Marley. 284 00:36:21,520.064 --> 00:36:22,290.064 In life. 285 00:36:22,510.064 --> 00:36:29,0.064 He was a moneylender who burdened people with usurious loans, metaphorically chained to their death. 286 00:36:29,800.064 --> 00:36:35,210.064 In death, Marley is burdened to carry the weight that he once put on others. 287 00:36:35,510.064 --> 00:36:41,340.064 Marley's chains made more heavy by the padlocked places where he held their money. 288 00:36:42,340.064 --> 00:36:53,35.064 The ghosts tell Scrooge, It is required of every man that the spirit within him should walk abroad amongst his fellow man and travel far and wide. 289 00:36:53,165.064 --> 00:36:58,365.0645 If that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death. 290 00:36:58,975.0645 --> 00:37:07,315.0645 It is doomed to wander through the world and woe is me and witness what it can no longer share, but might have shared on earth. 291 00:37:07,785.0645 --> 00:37:09,195.0645 And turn to happiness. 292 00:37:10,675.0645 --> 00:37:20,645.0645 This passage almost certainly draws from the ghost of Hamlet's father and what he tells Hamlet of the afterlife. 293 00:37:21,505.0635 --> 00:37:25,705.0635 I am thy father's spirit doomed for a certain term to walk the night. 294 00:37:26,325.0645 --> 00:37:33,775.0645 And for the day confined to fast and fires till the foul crimes done in my days of nature are burnt and purged away. 295 00:37:34,445.0645 --> 00:37:43,155.0635 But that I am forbid to tell the secrets of my prison house, I could tell a tale unfold whose lightest words would harrow up thy soul. 296 00:37:43,530.0645 --> 00:37:45,570.0645 Freeze thy young blood. 297 00:37:46,250.0645 --> 00:37:49,380.0645 For me the key phrase is certain term. 298 00:37:49,710.0645 --> 00:37:53,130.0645 In purgatory, unlike heaven and hell, the passage of time exists. 299 00:37:53,350.0635 --> 00:37:59,260.0645 In heaven and hell, the spirits do not feel the passage of time because the punishments and the rewards are eternal. 300 00:37:59,780.0645 --> 00:38:08,915.0645 In purgatory, however, Feeling the passage of time is part of the suffering that purges the soul of sin and prepares it for paradise. 301 00:38:09,345.0645 --> 00:38:14,465.0645 As I said up front, the Hamlet illusion isn't an accident, it's actually key to the story. 302 00:38:15,5.0645 --> 00:38:21,215.0635 We don't know that Shakespeare read Dante because the Divine Comedy had not yet been translated to English. 303 00:38:21,525.0635 --> 00:38:55,280.0645 But Shakespeare is very clearly processing the Catholic Protestant divide on the doctrine of Purgatory, which was heavily influenced really to the point of canonization by Dante's work and the idea of the spiritual guide that the path Through the past is a Dante idea The metaphor of marley's punishment is very much like Dante's constructions which Shakespeare doesn't copy with the king's ghost suggesting the dickens drew from both Shakespeare and Dante For this construction of Marley's ghost. 304 00:38:56,820.0645 --> 00:39:08,720.0645 However, one key difference is that Dante's ghosts do not walk the earth, but Dante's ideas that sinners are combined to the places of their sin is a key piece of Scrooge's later epiphany. 305 00:39:09,390.0645 --> 00:39:14,530.0645 Here, Marley says that my spirit never walked beyond our counting house. 306 00:39:14,540.0645 --> 00:39:16,360.0645 Mark me in life. 307 00:39:16,390.0645 --> 00:39:23,980.0645 My spirit never robed beyond the narrow limits of our money changing hole and weary journeys lie before me. 308 00:39:24,785.0645 --> 00:39:33,355.0645 This is where Dickens earlier descriptions of the tall city buildings, the narrow alleyways, and the frozen fog fits thematically. 309 00:39:33,725.0635 --> 00:39:39,55.0645 The claustrophobia of the city mirrors the lack of empathy of those who live and work there. 310 00:39:39,435.0645 --> 00:39:46,685.0655 If you never leave Cornhill, and the shadow of the banks, you do not experience the misery that those debts impose on people. 311 00:39:47,210.0655 --> 00:39:54,970.0655 You can even zoom out and apply this idea to England, or the Bank of England's war crimes committed in far flung colonies. 312 00:39:55,670.0655 --> 00:40:01,370.0645 And this was one of Charles Dickens most deeply held beliefs, that travel creates empathy. 313 00:40:01,510.0655 --> 00:40:10,950.066 Not just travel in the large sense, even though Dickens was one of England's most prominent Francophiles, he toured America twice, he did travel journalism in Italy. 314 00:40:11,640.066 --> 00:40:17,190.066 But more than that, Dickens walked the streets of London during the night. 315 00:40:17,200.065 --> 00:40:20,480.065 He would sometimes walk 20 miles at a time. 316 00:40:21,540.066 --> 00:40:25,90.066 He visited prisons, workhouses, cemeteries. 317 00:40:25,240.066 --> 00:40:30,860.065 He was a journalist by nature and by training, and he always went to the source. 318 00:40:31,670.066 --> 00:40:40,610.066 So later in this story, the ghost of Christmas present whisks Scrooge through the air all across England so that he can see the poverty and misery. 319 00:40:41,90.066 --> 00:40:50,710.065 The story structure also mirrors Dickens narrative technique in which his omniscient narrator takes a god like view, then takes the narration camera down into the action. 320 00:40:51,200.065 --> 00:40:58,105.066 And so Marley's sentence is apparently, Carrying his change to witness the poverty and the misery that he spread. 321 00:40:59,95.066 --> 00:41:07,810.066 The man who was chained to his desk in life is forced to walk unceasingly in death to see the world beyond his office. 322 00:41:07,810.066 --> 00:41:11,225.066 The lesson that he has to learn. 323 00:41:11,600.066 --> 00:41:23,10.066 is that mankind was my business, the common welfare was my business, charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were all my business. 324 00:41:23,650.066 --> 00:41:31,420.066 And for Marley, this lack of empathy and connection was personal, which is why he's here to visit his partner. 325 00:41:32,540.066 --> 00:41:40,40.066 The ghost of Marley says to Ebenezer, I have sat invisible beside you, many and many a day. 326 00:41:40,970.066 --> 00:41:49,270.066 That is no light part of my penance, to warn you that you have yet a chance and hope of escaping my fate. 327 00:41:50,400.066 --> 00:41:59,645.066 The ghost of Marley, then tells Scrooge that he must endure visits from three ghosts, without which, You cannot hope to shun the path I tread. 328 00:42:00,865.066 --> 00:42:04,535.066 Marley's ghost walked to the window, and Scrooge looks out. 329 00:42:04,965.066 --> 00:42:12,805.066 He sees the air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, moaning as they went. 330 00:42:13,205.066 --> 00:42:15,985.065 And Scrooge knew all of these phantoms. 331 00:42:16,135.065 --> 00:42:21,335.065 They were dead souls chained together, linked together like guilty governments. 332 00:42:21,335.165 --> 00:42:24,985.066 These specters then fade into the mist. 333 00:42:25,415.066 --> 00:42:33,125.066 The fog returns, and Scrooge falls asleep with his time bound appointments with the spirits already set. 334 00:42:34,75.066 --> 00:42:38,285.066 One final note, a great performance of Scrooge requires a hint of humor. 335 00:42:39,415.066 --> 00:42:49,85.066 We need to develop some empathy for Scrooge, to connect with him on a human level, and to sense the charisma that he once had, which flintiness all the worse. 336 00:42:49,635.066 --> 00:42:58,880.066 And Dickens does give Scrooge some laugh lines, you know, telling Marley that, He might be imagining the ghost because of some undigested beef. 337 00:42:58,880.066 --> 00:43:06,420.066 And here he tells Marley, couldn't I just take them all at once and have it over Jacob next time. 338 00:43:06,930.066 --> 00:43:08,410.065 The first of the three spirits. 339 00:43:08,720.066 --> 00:43:09,920.065 Thank you for listening. 340 00:43:09,980.066 --> 00:43:12,730.066 And I'll see you next time with the ghost of Christmas past.
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