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"The Last of the Spirits--The Pointing Finger," original illustration for A Christmas Carol by John Leech
The Politics of Seeing
The Politics of Seeing
It isn't always easy to confront all of the social injustice in the world around us, because once we see it we become accountable both to the suffering we see and to finding solutions to alleviate it. A Christmas Carol uses the willingness and unwillingness to see as an important way of tracing Scrooge's path from unethical miser to "as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew." At the beginning of A Christmas Carol, Scrooge refuses to look at the world around him, to see the shapes of other people's experience. Instead of looking, he puts his faith in the cruel institutions of government--"the treadmill and the Poor Law"--that banish impoverished people from view. Such a refusal to look is one of the primary regrets that Marley's ghost expresses to Scrooge: “Why did I walk through crowds of fellow-beings with my eyes turned down[?]," he asks. The journey Scrooge takes with the three spirits is one of learning how to see himself and others, no matter how hard it is to do so. By the story's end, he has learned that bearing witness is essential to ethically inhabiting the world: he "watched the people hurrying to and fro, and patted children on the head, and questioned beggars, and looked down into the kitchens of houses, and up to the windows, and found that everything could yield him pleasure."
An Entangled World
An Entangled World
The politics of seeing and refusing to see in A Christmas Carol is part of the story's larger investment in reminding us that we are all part of a world that is far bigger than our own isolated lives. Even the tale's metaphorical language tells us that humans and non-humans, bodies and environments, are inseparable from one another: "Mankind was my business," Marley tells Scrooge, before elaborating in language that connects human life to the planet we inhabit: "The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!" Scrooge's journey through time, which shows him how all of the different experiences of his life reverberate not only beyond his death but also across the lives of his nephew, the Cratchits, and others he barely thinks about, also teaches him to recognize himself as an integral part of an intermingled world. In his journey with the Ghost of Christmas Past, he becomes newly "conscious of a thousand odours floating in the air, each one connected with a thousand thoughts, and hopes, and joys, and cares long, long, forgotten!" This sensory transformation, in which the boundary between Scrooge's self and the outside world becomes porous, in which outside odours become inside joys, captures the story's larger ethical project of creating a world in which we cherish and celebrate our ghostly entanglements with each other and with the natural world.
"Mr. Fezziwig's Ball," original illustration for A Christmas Carol by John Leech
A Note on Dickens and Women
This production of A Christmas Carol beautifully shifts the lopsided gender dynamics of Dickens's original story by casting women as the story's Ghosts--women have power, vision, and compassion in this adaptation that Dickens doesn’t give them in the original text. There aren't many women to be found in the first Carol: Scrooge's story is accessorized with cardboard cutouts of perfect wives (Mrs. Fezziwig and Mrs. Cratchit), slightly shrewish wives (Fred's wife), and nearly-but-not wives (the fiancée who abandoned Scrooge when his love for money eclipsed his love for her), along with a few decorative sisters-in-law, but these women play little role in the sentimental moral arc of the tale. Although Dickens's later novels--especially Dombey and Son, Bleak House, and Great Expectations--feature complicated and compelling women in starring roles, Dickens is better known for creating idealized young women that read more like wish-fulfilling alternatives to his increasingly rocky domestic life than like fully elaborated characters.
Dickens's marriage to Catherine Hogarth was on shaky ground when he was writing Carol, cracking under financial pressure and the impending birth of a fifth child. While it recovered slightly as financial matters improved after Carol, by the 1850s it was over: having borne and raised ten children, Catherine had "outgrown [Dickens's] liking," as one letter from a neighbor put it, and Dickens wrote that Catherine made him "uneasy and unhappy." In 1858, after meeting Ellen Ternan during the production of The Frozen Deep, Dickens commenced plans to separate from his wife, which mid-Victorian divorce laws made no easy feat. As letters discovered in 2019 reveal, these plans included an attempt to have Catherine incarcerated in an asylum--thwarted because a doctor refused to cave to Dickens's request that he declare Catherine mentally ill--and finally resulted in Dickens moving Catherine into another house, which she inhabited with their oldest son Charley until her death in 1879. This separation and the adulterous reasons behind it (the affair with Ellen, along with false rumors of an affair between Dickens and Catherine's sister, Georgina), became fodder for public scandal that Dickens scrambled to suppress. Capitalizing on his reputation for benevolence and care, Dickens published an essay on the front page of Household Words in 1858 that attempted to defend both his actions and his privacy. Instead, the essay catapulted these personal matters prominently into the public eye.
The scandal ultimately had little effect on Dickens's celebrity or on his book sales, and his public readings remained hugely popular entertainments right up until his death in 1870. How to read Dickens's novels now, in light of revelations about his horrible treatment of Catherine and in the wake of the #metoo movement, remains a difficult question, especially given Dickens's proclivity to transparently embed aspects of his biography, his political leanings, and his relationship to institutions of Victorian culture in his writing. He's not one of those writers that we can easily read without considering authorial identity, and his relationships with the women in his life--wife, mistress, lost loves, daughters, and sisters-in-law--offer lenses through which to read the varied and fascinating women characters that do--and don't--populate his novels. Without excusing or ignoring Dickens's egregious behavior, we can use what we know as a generative tool for considering how Dickens's novels represent women's sentimentality, loyalty, superficiality, and vengeance.
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