A Psychological Reading of A Christmas Carol

The originating defence is a boundary drawn in public. Two gentlemen ask for the poor at Christmas. Scrooge asks whether the prisons and the workhouses are still in operation, then offers the line that will be quoted back at him: if they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. He adds that he does not know that, and that it is not his business. His own business occupies him constantly. The sentence does two kinds of work. It turns a particular clerk, a particular nephew, and a particular hungry street into a class that can be managed by institutions. And it protects him from knowing. 'I don't know that' is as important as the cruelty. Ignorance is being chosen in advance.

The coal-box is the same sentence in a room. Bob Cratchit cannot replenish the fire, because the box lives in the master's room, and the master predicts that any shovel will be an excuse to make off with coal. Warmth is treated as theft. A life built this way does not feel like hatred of one man. It feels like prudence. That is why the defence is so hard to argue with. Every refusal can be described as understanding one's own business and refusing to interfere with other people's. The interference he will not make is the interference that would let another body be warm.

Marley comes through the locked door in a chain of cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, and deeds. He wears the chain he forged in life, link by link and yard by yard, girded on of his own free will. The common welfare was his business. Charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were all his business. The dealings of his trade were a drop in that ocean. He holds the chain out. Scrooge's, he says, was as heavy and as long seven Christmas Eves ago, and Scrooge has laboured on it since. It is a ponderous chain.

Then the formal fact that organises the haunting. Scrooge looks at the floor, expecting fifty or sixty fathoms of iron cable, and sees nothing. The chain is real to the dead partner and invisible to the man who is still forging it. This is how a defence survives contact with the truth. The warning can be heard, the hardware can be described, and the body still finds no evidence. The book will have to show him consequences that cannot be filed as another man's ghost story.

The Ghost of Christmas Past takes him to a school that is not quite deserted. A solitary child, neglected by his friends, is left there still. Scrooge says he knows it, and sobs. The boy on the window-seat has been keeping company with Ali Baba and the other figures of his reading, because no living person came. When his sister Fan arrives, she is brimful of the news that father is kinder than he used to be, and that home is like heaven, and that he is to come home for good. The wound is not a mystery the later ghosts invent. It is a child who learned that presence is conditional, and that a story can be warmer than a room.

Fezziwig's warehouse sits beside that school for a reason. The old master lays down his pen at seven, rubs his hands, and spends an evening on his clerks. Scrooge, watching, defends the smallness of the cost. The spirit asks why he praises it. The answer he is forced toward is that the power of a master to make people happy or unhappy is not measured by the money spent. It returns a standard he once had, before prudence became the only feeling he trusted.

Belle does not accuse him of cruelty. She says another idol has displaced her, and if it can cheer and comfort him in time to come, as she would have tried to do, she has no just cause to grieve. He asks what idol. A golden one. She has watched his nobler aspirations fall off, one by one, until the master passion, Gain, engrosses him. The release is precise. She will not compete with a substitute that promises to do the work of a person: comfort, cheer, a future. Gold is being asked to be a companion that cannot leave, cannot be kinder or unkinder, and cannot require him to be known.

He then has to watch the life that continued without him. Belle's husband mentions an old friend, and the house is loud with children. Scrooge cannot bear the light and asks the spirit to take him away. The defence against attachment is no longer abstract. He can see the fireside he refused, and the sight is intolerable because it proves the idol did not cheer him. Gain kept its promise of occupation. It did not keep the promise Belle named, which was comfort. The chapter ends with that failure visible and still unpaid.

Christmas Present opens a parlour the ledger had flattened into surplus. The Cratchits smell their goose outside the baker's and know it for their own. Bob calls a toast to Mr Scrooge, the Founder of the Feast. Mrs Cratchit reddens. She wishes she had him there, so she could give him a piece of her mind to feast upon. She drinks the toast for her husband's sake and because the day is Christmas, and she says it will be the last time. Her refusal matters. The book does not make the injured household grateful in advance. Love at that table is for one another. The founder is tolerated as a name, not welcomed as a man.

Tiny Tim's crutch leans in that room, and the spirit tells Scrooge that if these shadows remain unaltered, the child will die. Scrooge asks whether nothing can be done. The ghost answers with Scrooge's own sentence: if he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Scrooge hangs his head. This is the stake shifting inside the defence. A line that worked on two gentlemen in an office cannot survive being spoken over a particular boy whose family has just toasted the man who said it. Quotation is the haunting's method. It does not invent a new morality. It returns his language to a body.

Before the spirit leaves, he shows what the sentence has been hiding. From the folds of his robe come two children, wretched, abject, frightful, miserable. The boy is Ignorance. The girl is Want. Beware of them both, he says, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow is written Doom, unless the writing be erased. Scrooge asks whether they have no refuge or resource. The answer is his own again: are there no prisons, are there no workhouses.

The pair is the book's structural confession. Ignorance is not a lack of information in the street. It is the 'I don't know that' Scrooge offered the gentlemen, now given a body and a brow. Want is the condition his business refused to call his own. Placed under the robe of Christmas Present, they are what festivity conceals when plenty is allowed to walk past hunger. The warning is not that Scrooge might become poor. It is that a city which keeps these two unaltered will meet a doom already written. His private chain and the public children are the same labour.

The last spirit does not speak. It points. Scrooge is shown businessmen who treat a death as a convenience, then a charwoman, a laundress, and an undertaker's man selling the dead man's things to old Joe, bed-curtains among them. Someone suggests the funeral will be cheap, because nobody can be named who would go unless a lunch is provided. Rats gnaw under a hearthstone. He still does not know the wretched man's name. He asks to see some tenderness connected with a death, and the tenderness he is shown belongs to another house. Then the finger finds the neglected grave, walled in by houses, choked with weeds, and he reads the name he had now to learn: Ebenezer Scrooge.

This is where the defence breaks. He falls on his knees and asks if he is the man who lay upon the bed. The finger moves from the grave to him and back. He bargains. He promises to honour Christmas in his heart, and try to keep it all the year, to live in the Past, the Present, and the Future, and not shut out the lessons of the spirits. The vow is extracted in a churchyard, before any turkey is bought. Terror is doing what memory and quotation prepared. He can see the chain only when it has become a stone with his name, and a room where his curtains are already merchandise.

The last stave is short, and the shortness is psychological. He wakes, sends a boy for the prize turkey, the big one, and has it taken to Bob Cratchit's. He passes his nephew's door a dozen times before he has the courage to knock. He raises the clerk's salary, and Bob, for a moment, thinks of knocking him down with a ruler and calling for help. The narrator then hurries the future into a boast: to Tiny Tim, who did not die, Scrooge was a second father, and he became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man as the good old City knew. The insistence is loud because the night was loud. A conversion proved in one morning of spending still has to be trusted on credit.

Does the ending resolve the tension or cover it? It resolves the sentence 'not my business' by making him spend on named people: a turkey at a door, a wage, a dinner he was afraid to enter. It does not replay the schoolroom, Belle, or the children under the robe. The narrator who began by joking that he did not know what was particularly dead about a door-nail ends by refusing any doubt. That rush is the formal risk of the book. Five staves build a man who could not see his chain. The fifth spends the money and declares the mourning finished. The reader is left holding both the stone and the turkey, and they are not the same size.

The Carol keeps being reduced to a generous morning, because a generous morning is easier to repeat than a sentence. What the book actually studies is the relief of calling suffering an institution. Prisons, workhouses, surplus population: the phrases change, and the relief does not. A ledger, a timetable, a policy, a feed of other people's emergencies can all do what the coal-box did, which is to make warmth look like a loss. Readers recognise the hang of the head when a line they have used in comfort is spoken back over someone with a name. They also recognise the speed of stave five. After the fright, the culture prefers the turkey. The stone, the unsold bed-curtains, and the two children under the robe are heavier, and they do not fit a season.

Dickens wrote the book in a few weeks in 1843, after the ragged schools and a parliamentary report on children at work, and he needed it to sell. A reading that centres one man's disavowal can underplay that public aim. Ignorance and Want are not only figures of Scrooge's psyche. They are a political warning about untaught and unfed children, and the book asks for erasure of a writing on a brow, which is reform, not only private remorse. Mrs Cratchit's anger and Bob's fear of the ruler are reminders that the household does not exist to complete his conversion.

There is also a risk in calling the chain a defence and the grave a breakthrough, as if terror were a reliable teacher. The spirits are plot. Plenty of people hear their own sentences quoted and do not fall on their knees. The ending's speed may be faith, or it may be a marketable close. Both can be true. This reading treats the night as a psyche under pressure. It does not prove that a fright before dawn changes a city, or even a master, once the turkey has been eaten.

Hard Times, on this shelf, studies a neighbouring defence. Gradgrind plants Facts so that feeling never has to be met, then hears his own lesson returned by the pupil he made. Scrooge plants a smaller sentence, 'not my business,' and hears it returned by a spirit over a child's chair. In both books the quotation is the injury. Great Expectations is the other Dickens pressure here: a life organised by money that was supposed to purchase a self, until the source of the money ruins the story. Belle already names that purchase a golden idol. Pip lives inside a longer version of the same substitution, class shame where Scrooge had a ledger. The Carol finishes in a morning. Those two novels refuse to let the morning be enough.