It was 178 years ago this week when Charles Dickens and his publisher put the final touches on a thin volume, written for the holiday season, that would soon fly off the bookshelves.
The prose in "A Christmas Carol" managed simultaneously to be both spare and rich -- not unlike Ebenezer Scrooge's put-upon clerk, Bob Cratchit. The miserly boss paid his underling a weekly wage of 15 shillings. Dickens' readers, knowing that the Cockney slang for a shilling was "a bob," could smile when the author wrote that Bob "pocketed on Saturdays but fifteen copies of his Christian name."
For lovers of language, Dickens was full of such little gifts, starting with that name "Scrooge," which has entered the lexicon, along with "Bah! Humbug!" and other Dickensian expressions. "A Christmas Carol," with its spirits, time travel, and altering of the future, is not a work of realism. Nor is it secular. "It is good to be children sometimes, and never better at Christmas," Dickens wrote, "when its mighty Founder was a child himself."
Yet it challenged readers' consciences regardless of their religious beliefs, or lack thereof. "Are there no workhouses?" Ebenezer Scrooge tells two visitors to his shop who've come seeking donations for the poor. "And the Union workhouses -- are they still in operation?"
This is the theme that goes to the heart of the holiday, and the crux of Dickens' novel, and it is a timeless one, which is why this story remains relevant. Today in politics, we are wrestling with issues as specific as the minimum wage and as broad as what constitutes social justice -- and whether access to medical care should be considered a basic human right. By the end of "A Christmas Carol," Scrooge certainly thought so: It was the plight of sickly Tiny Tim that completed his conversion.
Everyone familiar with the story has their favorite passages from "A Christmas Carol." One of mine begins when Scrooge is first visited by the spirit of his long-dead partner, Jacob Marley.
"But you were always a good man of business, Jacob," Scrooge protests.
"Business!" bellows the riled-up ghost. "Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were all my business!"
Eighty-two years later, at the National Press Club, Calvin Coolidge was cast in the role of Scrooge. Or so legend has it.
"The business of America is business," the 30th U.S. president is forever quoted as saying, and not approvingly. But this was not quite what he said, and hardly what he meant.
President Coolidge's exact words were, "After all, the chief business of the American people is business."
But he was laying his rhetorical foundation while building to a different point -- very nearly the opposite point, actually.
"Of course, the accumulation of wealth cannot be justified as the chief end of existence," Coolidge added in his 1925 speech. "We want wealth, but there are many other things that we want very much more. We want peace and honor, and that charity which is so strong an element of all civilization."
"The chief ideal of the American people," Calvin Coolidge concluded, "is idealism."
And that's our quote of the week.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.