Fwd: delanceyplace.com 12/23/08-dickens and christmas

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In today's excerpt-at the end of the 19th

century, Dickens' short novel, A

Christmas Carol, had readership second

only to the Bible's:

" If

only Ebenezer Scrooge had not, in the

excitement of his transformation from miser

to humanitarian, diverged from the

traditional Christmas goose to surprise Bob

Cratchit with a turkey 'twice the size of

Tiny Tim.' But-alas--he did, and as

A Christmas Carol approaches its 165th

birthday, a Google search answers the

plaint 'leftover turkey' with more than

300,000 promises of recipes to dispatch it.

As for England's goose-raising industry, it

tanked. ...

" The public's extraordinary and lasting

embrace of

Dickens's short novel is but one evidence

of the 19th century's changing attitude

toward Christmas. In 1819, Washington

Irving's immensely popular 'Sketch Book

of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent' had 'glorified'

the 'social rites' of the season. Clement

's 1823 poem 'The Night Before

Christmas' introduced a fat and jolly St.

Nick whose obvious attractions eclipsed

what had been a 'foreboding figure of

judgment' as likely to distribute canings

as gifts. Queen and her Bavarian

husband, Albert, 'great boosters of the

season,' had installed a Christmas tree

in Windsor Castle each year since 1840,

encouraging a fad that spread overseas

to America by 1848. ...

" What is true is that Christmas, more

than any other holiday, offered a means

for the adult Dickens to redeem the despair

and terrors of his childhood. In 1824,

after a series of financial embarrassments

drove his family to exchange what he

remembered as a pleasant country

existence for a 'mean, small tenement'

in London, the 12-year-old Dickens, his

schooling interrupted--ended, for all he

knew--was sent to work 10-hour days at

a shoe blacking factory in a quixotic attempt

to remedy his family's insolvency.

Not even a week later, his father was

incarcerated in the infamous Marshalsea

prison for a failure to pay a small debt to a

baker. At this, Dickens's 'grief and

humiliation' overwhelmed him so thoroughly

that it retained the power to overshadow his

adult accomplishments, calling him to

'wander desolately back' to the scene of

his mortification. And because Dickens's

tribulations were not particular to him but

emblematic of the Industrial

Revolution--armies of neglected, unschooled

children forced into labor--the concerns that

inform his fiction were shared by millions

of potential readers. ...

" Replacing the slippery Holy Ghost with

anthropomorphized spirits, the infant Christ with

a crippled child whose salvation waits on

man's--not God's--generosity, Dickens

laid claim to a religious festival, handing

it over to the gathering forces of secular

humanism. If a single night's crash course

in man's power to redress his mistakes

and redeem his future without appealing

to an invisible and silent deity could

rehabilitate even so apparently lost a cause as

Ebenezer Scrooge, imagine what it might

do for the rest of us! "

on, " Father Christmas, " The

New York Times Review of Books, December

7, 2008, p. 14.

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-- As within, so without~ Alice O. HowellAll joy in the world comes from wishing happiness for others;all suffering from wanting pleasure for oneself.~Shantideva (7th. c. CE)

A propensity to hope and joy is real riches: one to fear and sorrow, real poverty~e Hume