Good morning, it's Friday Dec. 20, 2024, the day of the week when I reprise a quotation from U.S. history, arts, or letters intended to be uplifting or enlightening. Today's poignant words come from Charles Dickens.
No, Dickens certainly wasn't an American. But as I mentioned in Tuesday's newsletter, he was partially inspired to write "A Christmas Carol" by a Protestant minister he met in New England. Besides, when one still has Christmas shopping to do and stories to edit, doesn't quoting Dickens seem like an efficient use of time?
Most people who have read "A Christmas Carol" (or seen movie or stage adaptations) have their favorite lines of dialogue or narrative. As a professional writer and editor and someone who takes an especial interest in writing "ledes," I marvel at Charles Dickens' opening lines.
Readers (along with Ebenezer Scrooge) are rather quickly going to make the acquaintance with Scrooge's former business partner, one Jacob Marley. Or rather, meet Marley's ghost. So Dickens doesn't fool about. He begins his story this way:
"Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail."
Okay, that's just the writing coach in me. There are far more uplifting passages in this heartwarming tale. One of the best takes place at the home of Scrooge's nephew Fred.
To set it up: In one of the earliest scenes in the story, Fred comes by Scrooge's shop to urge him to come to Christmas dinner. Scrooge not only declines the invitation, but he insults his nephew while dismissing Christmas itself as "a humbug."
Scrooge then disparages poor people to two volunteers collecting money for the less fortunate, and grouses to his clerk, Bob Cratchit, about the unfairness of Christmas Day being a holiday.
When Cratchit observes meekly that it was only once a year, his miserly boss lights into him:
"A poor excuse for picking a man's pocket every twenty-fifth of December!" said Scrooge. "But I suppose you must have the whole day. Be here all the earlier next morning."
But back to Fred. His house is one of the places where the second spirit who visits Scrooge, Ghost of Christmas, has taken Scrooge.
A wholesome dinner party is taking place, complete with music, dancing, and word games. But it is not the ghost nor any of the partygoers who ascribe great importance to the merriment taking place. It is Dickens himself, in the role of narrator. The author tells the reader, as an aside, "If you should happen, by any unlikely chance, to know a man more blessed in a laugh than Scrooge's nephew, all I can say is, I should like to know him too. Introduce him to me, and I'll cultivate his acquaintance."
Dickens then describes the scene Scrooge could have witnessed in the flesh, had he not rebuffed his nephew's invitation to dinner (but is allowed to glimpse because of the spirit's magic).
The key fact is simple enough: Fred is laughing.
"When Scrooge's nephew laughed in this way, holding his sides, rolling his head, and twisting his face into the most extravagant contortions, Scrooge's niece, by marriage, laughed as heartily as he. And their assembled friends, being not a bit behindhand, roared out lustily."
Dickens is making a crucial observation, a point of commentary he doesn't risk letting the reader miss. So he adds:
"It is a fair, even-handed, noble adjustment of things, that, while there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good-humour."
And that is our quote of the week.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on X @CarlCannon.
