Good morning, it's Tuesday, Dec. 17, 2024. It was 181 years ago this week that British publishing house Chapman & Hall issued a thin novel by Charles Dickens destined to be a classic. From that day until this one, "A Christmas Carol" has never been out of print.
It's sometimes asserted that Dickens' enduring yarn "invented" how we celebrate the 25th of December. That's not really true. For one thing, no Christmas tree appears in his story. And though the book (and, later, theater and film adaptations) certainly fueled the altruistic impulses of Americans as well as readers in audiences in Great Britain and elsewhere, George Washington was celebrating Christmas as early as 1759, when he made a point of marrying Martha Custis on the 12th day of Christmas, which had long been a season of feasting, merriment, and church-going.
This raises another angle: the religiosity of Dickens' novel. A narrative driven by ghosts is, by definition, not a secular story. Also, several characters in "A Christmas Carol," most notably Bob Cratchit and Ebenezer Scrooge's nephew Fred are clearly believers. Yet the novel also has an ecumenical message that transcends Christianity or religious faith of any kind. Redemption narratives are stories about second chances, a message not limited to Christianity, and a concept as American as apple pie and as universal as the human experience itself.
Charles Dickens sailed to America for the first time in 1842. Much of what he found disillusioned him. His fame left him little privacy; he found our politics appalling and American manners gross. Most of all he loathed slavery.
Yet, he also met several of the three-named New England luminaries, including abolitionists Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Ellery Channing. The latter was an influential Unitarian pastor whose congregation impressed Dickens with its works-based approach to Christian faith. When he returned to England, Dickens joined a Unitarian church. But he also wrote a snarky little book about his visit, which struck his hosts on this side of the Atlantic as ungracious. To those who feted him and fawned over him, the man seemed an ingrate.
When Dickens returned to America two years after the Civil War (and 25 years after the publication of "A Christmas Carol"), all was forgiven. He did sold-out, one-man performances of his famous story to rapturous East Coast audiences. Can you imagine hearing Dickens play Ebenezer Scrooge?
In the 20th century, long after Dickens passed away and motion pictures replaced print as the preeminent medium for Yuletide entertainment, an all-star team of Hollywood heavyweights played Scrooge through the decades: Lionel Barrymore, Alastair Sim, George C. Scott, Albert Finney, Michael Caine, Patrick Stewart, Will Farrell, Tom Hanks, Kelsey Grammer, Jim Carrey, and more.
Filmmakers like to update classic stories, too, and these adaptions range from Frank Capra's classic "It's a Wonderful Life" to the less-subtly titled "Scrooged," an underappreciated 1988 vehicle for Bill Murray. Murray's Scrooge is an aptly named character named "Frank Cross," an arrogant, selfish, and vain television executive.
Bill Murray inhabits the role as though he's in on the joke, the joke being that in modern culture you can be as terrible a person as Ebenezer Scrooge and not only get rich, but also famous – even beloved.
Another interesting twist in "Scrooged" is that the Tiny Tim character is rendered as "Calvin Cooley," a boy who has been traumatized to the point where he no longer speaks.
One supposes (at least I suppose) this is a two-pronged spoof. For starters, "Silent Cal" Coolidge was America's most famously taciturn president. Also, liberals have spent the better part of a century castigating the 30th U.S. president for his supposed observation that "The business of America is business."
This line is supposed to invoke Scrooge's defensive initial response when visited by his first ghost: the spirit of his long-dead partner, Jacob Marley. "But you were always a good man of business, Jacob," Scrooge protests.
("Business!" responds the riled-up ghost. "Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were all my business!")
But Calvin Coolidge would have not argued Marley's plaintive observation at all.
It's true that 82 years after "A Christmas Carol" was published Coolidge discussed the ethos of private enterprise at the National Press Club. But Coolidge was building to a point – the point made by Marley, not by Scrooge.
"After all, the chief business of the American people is business," Coolidge said in his 1925 speech. Then the president added this: "Of course, the accumulation of wealth cannot be justified as the chief end of existence. 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."
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on X @CarlCannon.
