In ‘A Christmas Carol’ 2020, doom-scrolling is ‘Bah! Humbug!’
In mid-December, some 177 years ago, 6,000 copies of “A Christmas Carol,” went on sale in England and were sold out by Christmas day. It has never gone out of print. In filmed versions, more than 30 actors have portrayed miser Ebenezer Scrooge, the lead character.
Why does “A Christmas Carol” endure? In a 2020 update of this classic by Charles Dickens, Scrooge’s one employee Bob Cratchit would be doom-scrolling from home and his eldest daughter, Martha, would be sick in bed with COVID that she caught from another essential worker. Crachit’s eldest son, Peter, would be in outpatient rehab for opioid addiction. Tiny Tim, his disabled son, would be in virtual therapy, recovering from cyberbullying.
Scrooge is the most famous character in “A Christmas Carol” and his redemption is at the heart of Dickens’ ghost story. But Bob Cratchit provides an almost surreal element in the narrative. A pale-faced, white male office worker, a scrivener, his goodwill toward his evil employer defies credulity. When “A Christmas Carol” first emerged in its gilded-edged, first edition, the British public of 1843 recognized Bob Cratchit and his family as icons of the impoverished working classes. England was going through what was called “The Hungry ’40s,” a wretched time for the working class.
The Comeback of “The Hungry ‘40s”
So, welcome back to 1843! There are millions of Cratchit families in America this year. Maybe they don’t have six children. But they do have a mother working probably at least part-time and a working, under-paid, middle-aged father. They have mostly school-age children (and perhaps one young adult child still living under their roof!)
Sound familiar?
In your neighborhood, there is probably a family like this in freefall from the middle class into the working class, or from the working class into deep poverty.
To say that they are living from paycheck to paycheck doesn’t capture their plight. Each month, these American families rely on the kindness of generous strangers or local food banks, and perhaps, on the pathetically modest EBT/SNAP supplements to get by. Some use the cash that once purchased organic green bananas or fresh-ground turkey to pay the rent or monthly mortgage.
A few weeks from now In 2021, an eviction or foreclosure crisis may hit since 17.8 million adults are currently living in households behind on housing payments. It is as if the entire population of the NYC Metropolitan area will be turned out of their homes on January 1.
Among Blacks and Hispanics, the percentage of households behind on rent, mortgage, or utility payments have jumped dramatically over the summer compared to the spring. In some subgroups, there was a fourfold increase in delinquent payments from March-May to June-August.
In the second half of 2020, the US poverty rate has soared as an additional 7.8 million people have lost steady income and dropped below the poverty line, according to December research coming from the University of Chicago and University of Notre Dame.
The current rate is 11.7 percent, an increase of 2.4 percentage points since June. This staggering jump is the largest increase in a single year since the federal government began publishing poverty rates 60 years ago, even though the rate is low by historical standards.
Poverty is hitting harder for people with a high school education or less, Blacks, and children. Food insecurity, a basic measure of food access and stability, is soaring. In New York City, 1.2 million (including one in five children) are food insecure, according to City Harvest. Visits to city food pantries and soup kitchens are up 33 percent since March. For millions, there will be no Christmas goose on the dining room table.
“The Old Hungry ’40s”
England moved into the 19th Century with a grim forecast.
In 1798, economist Thomas Robert Malthus published his “The Principle of Population.” This essay issued catastrophic warnings that the “surplus population,” the underclass of the working poor and destitute, was destined to perish from war, famine, or pestilence and this fate of the poor was all but inescapable.
Technological changes were also creating infernal economic machines. In the early 1800s, a human treadmill was patented that could employ up to 24 people at a time to grind corn. The treadmilling poor and prisoners were reportedly given 12 minutes of rest per hour of grinding.
From his earliest days, Dickens experienced poverty first-hand. His father served time in a debtors prison and Dickens spent part of his childhood laboring in a boot-blacking factory. At the time, the elite and ruling classes enshrined such ideas about managing poverty and population in the 1834 Poor Law.
Then, in the 1840s financial catastrophe came in the form of an economic depression and two failed harvests that caused food prices to spike. Even in the best of times, the population was outpacing food production. Consequently, in Britain, the 1840s were labeled “The Hungry ‘40s.”
Dickens witnessed starving families inhabiting the streets and may have seen a human treadmill during a Fall 1843 visit to his relatives in Manchester, an older sister, and her disabled son Harry.
He first voiced his outrage against the rich who hoarded their wealth in an October 5, 1843, speech. Later that Fall, Dickens began writing “A Christmas Carol.” He may have been inspired by his nephew Harry, who later died, to insert Tiny Tim as the ailing, medically untreated son of the Cratchits.
When the book was published on December 19, 1843, people were looking for more meaning to Christmas than the usual drunken celebrations. As the author and great-great-great-granddaughter of Dickens observed, “The plot also highlighted how Christmas had lost its former purpose, as a time of charitable giving.” Indeed, “The British Isles were ripe for a Christmas renaissance.”
Dickens placed details of the Poor Law into the mouth of Ebenezer Scrooge, the miserly uncle and boss of Bob Cratchits. Speaking about the destitute who would rather die than go to a workhouse or labor on a treadmill, Scrooge dismissed them. “If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
Christmas with the working-class Cratchits
Early in 19th Century Britain, Christmas festivities were declining and losing their meaning. A combination of Puritan animus, Utilitarian philosophy, and a roaring industrialization all contributed to a decline of public Christmas celebrations.
In the mid-18th century, the Puritan-minded unsuccessfully attempted to ban Christmas Day observance outright. They said it was unbiblical, too Roman Catholic in its ritual emphasis on religious holidays, and an occasion for public drunkenness. Churches were locked and the government decreed that “fasting and humiliation” should be practiced on December 25.
“The Puritan ban,” wrotes British historian Bernard Capp, “had the perverse effect of making Christmas less religious as people still stopped work on the 25th of December and secretly treated it as a time to eat, drink, and enjoy themselves.”
British Utilitarians and industrialists were on the rise in the early 19th century, and they had little use for a public Christmas holiday. It wasn’t “useful,” too religious, and idled the factory assembly lines. The arrival of the British factory brought about the industrial age and workers by the tens of thousands labored in “dark satanic mills,” as the poet William Blake wrote in his poem “Jerusalem” (1808). He hoped for a rebuilding of England as a new Jerusalem’s “green & pleasant Land.”
Dickens portrays a different vision of Christmas and of ordinary people. The working-class Cratchits are vividly portrayed as loving, wholesome, intimate, but impoverished. This is one of our most enduring images of the family with the spirit of a team. There was just money enough to pay once a year for the Christmas goose and plum pudding to share the love of the Christmas season. To those who know them, the Cratchit family still resonates deeply with the current American ethos—we are hard at work, but still unable to make ends meet.
We love our teams and our families. Most teams desire to have a durable set of family-like values, and many healthy families want team spirit. The Cratchits fit the bill. Dickens further underscores this idea with Fezzwig, the boss who treated Scrooge like a son and saw his employees as an extension of his own family.
Family values and team spirit in so many ways define the kind of relations we desire to have with each other. When love, respect, and companionship merge with camaraderie, achievement, and collaboration, people accomplish truly stunning things. This ideal is particularly vivid in our current situation.
We have seen teams of nurses, doctors, care techs, and hospital chaplains provide heroic levels of service to COVID patients of all ages and races.
They model for us that bonds of love and affection are truly stronger than death, even for people in urgent need who are otherwise strangers. If a team is there for you when your family cannot be, that team becomes your second family.
Scrooge is visited by several Ghosts who picture the joys of Christmas with the bleakness of his life. One Ghost shows him Bob Cratchit’s son Tiny Tim with the observation that this happy child will die unless the course of events change.
When the Ghost of Christmas-Present ushers Scrooge into the presence of the Cratchit family at Christmas dinner, Scrooge is cut to the heart. We discover that a primary reason Scrooge fears the Ghost of Christmas-Yet-to-Come is his last desperate wish to redeem the meaning of his own life.
Second Fatherhood, Second Family
Dickens desired for Christmas to be rediscovered. But he’s up to more than that simple holiday’s revitalization. He wants society to change.
After the ghostly visitations, a joyfully crazed Scrooge buys the prize turkey for the Cratchit family and then raises Bob’s salary.
So far so good!
Then, Dickens tells us that Scrooge became a “second father” to Tiny Tim, and the Cratchits became his second family. What does Tiny Tim represent to Scrooge?
I think Scrooge saw himself in the life of Tiny Tim, and he decided to create his renewed life around service to others.
Many people later in life seek a second vocation, a larger purpose beyond fame and fortune.
Scrooge also seemed to understand the charity alone is never enough. Charity must give way to opportunity.
At the very end of A Christmas Carol, Scrooge offers to “discuss affairs” with Bob Cratchit over a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop, a beloved English concoction of mulled wine. Is this perhaps the prelude to a new partnership, perhaps “Scrooge & Cratchit”?
We will never know. But 177 years later, the underlying message holds true.
The “Hungry ‘40s” didn’t last in Britain, and our COVID 19 catastrophe won’t either despite the unfathomable loss of 325,000 plus Americans from COVID.
In the heart of hard times, teams and families take on new challenges, start new traditions, make new meanings, “adopt” new members, and reinvent themselves. These are the families and teams better poised to bounce back when the dark clouds vanish — or a vaccine appears. May our working-class families rejuvenate. All of our families and teams, God bless them every one!
Merry Christmas!
Tim Morgan is a board member of A Journey through NYC religions. He is director of the Journalism Certificate Program at Wheaton College (Illinois) and has been a journalist since 1980. An award-winning journalist, Morgan has served as editor-in-chief of a daily newspaper, deputy managing editor of a national magazine (Christianity Today), and as a correspondent for national and international news services. For most of his career, he has trained students, peers, and educators in the essentials of journalism as well as the use of digital and online technology. In 2012, he launched www.MillennialInflux.com, a website designed to showcase the journalism of early-career Millennials. He is a member of the Evangelical Press Association and the Society of Professional Journalists.
A different take on Dickens! Interesting.
Prеtty! This has been a really wonderful post.