Community and the Power of Selflessness: How A Christmas Carol Teaches the Vital Lesson of Philanthropy

 by Bryony Hart

As an English teacher, I can’t possibly let this Giving Day at PGS pass by without offering a literary reflection to the community. It is also World Book Week as well so what an opportunity to celebrate one of the greatest stories in the English language.  I see this blog entry as both my creative contribution and my service to today’s events! I wonder if I can double-up my points? I shall wait and see. 

Everyone knows A Christmas Carol (1843) by the Victorian novelist Charles Dickens.  If you haven’t read the novella, you most will certainly have seen The Muppets version of the story with Michael Caine as miserly Ebenezer Scrooge (1992). And if you haven’t seen this, well I am sure that you have a clear image of what Father Christmas looks like - if this is the case, you’ll have Dickens to thank for that (minus the hairy chest, perhaps). 

Unknown Artist, from A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (1843)

A Christmas Carol is a story about what happens when one is NOT philanthropic. It is a warning.  And a rather urgent one. As many of you well know, Dickens was preoccupied with the state of the poor and unjustifiable impoverished experiences of humankind. Just think of some of his main characters. Most are parentless, poor, suffering and social outcasts. Yet, what is interesting about this story is that the central character is not poor: far from it. However, he is certainly a social outcast because of the way he treats people. In the most recent adaptation of this most wonderful tale (2019) where Tom Hardy plays Scrooge, we are given an insight into the possible cause of his wretched miserliness. It is the result of his father’s brutal rejection of him as a child, and of the terrible abuse he suffers at the hands of the House Master.  This rejection then forces Scrooge, as he grows older, to find solace in money, much like George Eliot’s eponymous character Silas Marner who turns to hoarding gold after his is most unfairly rejected by his community for a crime that he didn’t commit. We can see their reasoning for retreating into isolation and the seemingly joyful companionship of money, but these actions are fundamentally flawed. 

So, what we have here is a tale, in both A Christmas Carol and Silas Marner (1861), of human beings who have suffered a hardship and have turned inward, forcing others away in favour of the more tangible and reliable companionship of golden coins, increasing profits and one’s own company.  As a result of this, both have hard exteriors, impenetrable to the outside world.  One only has to recall Dickens’ opening description of Scrooge in the first Stave. Forgive the long quotation, but one really does need to read the whole thing in order to get a sense of Scrooge’s absolute rejection of all humanity: 

Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas.

External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty. Foul weather didn’t know where to have him. The heaviest rain, and snow, and hail, and sleet, could boast of the advantage over him in only one respect. They often “came down” handsomely, and Scrooge never did.

Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with gladsome looks, “My dear Scrooge, how are you? When will you come to see me?” No beggars implored him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him what it was o’clock, no man or woman ever once in all his life inquired the way to such and such a place, of Scrooge. Even the blind men’s dogs appeared to know him; and when they saw him coming on, would tug their owners into doorways and up courts; and then would wag their tails as though they said, “No eye at all is better than an evil eye, dark master!”

But what did Scrooge care! It was the very thing he liked. To edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance, was what the knowing ones call “nuts” to Scrooge.

In favour of increased profit margins, Scrooge only allows one piece of coal to heat his offices much to the suffering of his worker, Bob Cratchett. He reluctantly allows Bob one day off to celebrate Christmas but reminds him that the celebration of Christ’s birth is ‘“ a poor excuse for picking a man’s pocket every twenty-fifth of December!”’ rather than seeing it as a time to celebrate family, friends, community and the arrival of Jesus Christ. When the ‘portly gentlemen’ come asking for charitable donations for the ‘poor and destitute’ he angrily casts them aside and protests ‘“ Are there no prisons? [....] And the Union workhouses? Are they still in operation? [....] The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?”’ When his only nephew, Fred, the son of his deceased and once much-loved sister, asks him to come to dinner, Scrooge brutally rejects the invitation in favour of sitting alone and eating gruel in his dark rooms. 

The picture that is painted here by Dickens is a man who is alive but not living, for how can one live without love, community and for a care for others who are less fortunate than ourselves? His nephew is robust in his view of the world and states that:

“There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,” returned the nephew. “Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!”

And this is where the story of the importance of philanthropy comes in. We are given a stark warning by Dickens: hoard and be selfish at your own peril, for a successful community requires involvement, sacrifice and commitment. Human happiness resides in community and one’s isolation from it will surely result in a miserable end. Recall Scrooge’s moment of revelation at the end of the novel when he spies his own gravestone after seeing a group of men joke about his death. Ponder of the solitary death of Dunstan Cass from Silas Marner who sinks to the bottom of the stonepits after stealing Silas’s hard-earned cash. 

One might think that the novella is just about how horrid Scrooge is, but it is not. What we see in this text is a whole host of wonderful philanthropic individuals who work hard to keep the community going. The ‘portly gentleman’ work hard to gather funds to support the poorest members of society; Fred looks out for his uncle, even though he is a most wretched man at this point in the novel; Fezziwig splashes the cash at Christmas to celebrate his employees and sees this as a good investment; the Cratchetts celebrate their meagre Christmas meal but are thankful for their lot and for the love of family.  And eventually, Scrooge is added to this list.  After enduring the visits of the three spirits, Scrooge suddenly realises the errors of his ways and raises Bob’s salary, gives his family the prize turkey from the butchers, goes to his nephew to celebrate Christmas with his only family member and invests time, love and commitment into his care for the wider community. 

If you haven’t read this book, today is the day for picking it up.  It is a ghost story set at Christmas but the message is much more than its setting. As Dickens reflects at the end of the novella:

Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did not die, he was a second father. He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms. His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him.

I hope your philanthropic deeds make your heart laugh because that should be quite enough for us all.