Book Report: Charles Dickens Christmas Books

I don’t think it’s cheating to put all five Christmas Books in one note, do you? I read them out of two volumes of Charles Dickens’ Christmas Stories and Leftover Stuff We Had Lying Around the Shed, so I could put them into two notes, which doesn’t make much sense to me. Or I could make five different notes, but that seems as much like cheating (to increase the count of Books Read in 2008) as putting them in one (to get caught up by December 31). Ah, well. Here’s a rundown:

• A Christmas Carol really is a marvelous book, just magnificently written, with the proper mix of spookiness and fun. I understand why people read it every year, and why people keep making it into movies and plays, and why he made so much money on this one that he kept writing them.
• The Chimes takes a while to get started, and then has some draggy bits, but Trotty Veck is a good character (although like Scrooge, once Things Start to Happen, he fades a bit until the Last Bit), and I like Alderman Cute and Sir Joseph Bowley as the public and private face of so-called charity.
• The Cricket on the Hearth is a sweet story, except that it is exceedingly creepy in two places, and as with some of Mr. Dickens’es happy endings, I find it impossible to believe that the happy couple, come together against adversity at last, won’t be wishing each other dead in six months.
• The less said about The Battle of Life the better, except to warn Gentle Readers not to read it unless they really, really, really like Dickens, and even then, the only joy is the joy of completion.
• The Haunted Man is really magnificent, although again there’s the problem that Mr. Dickens cannot write females that he likes without making me loathe them. Still, there are wonderful scenes, scary and funny, and great characters, and it would make a marvelous play or film; it’s odd that it’s never been done.

The introduction to one of the volumes pointed out that all of the stories center around death and resurrection: Ebenezer Scrooge, of course, visits his own grave, but Trotty Veck also sees the result of his fall from the clocktower and then lives to change his future, the son who was thought dead returns in disguise in The Cricket, and the daughter in The Battle, and although The Haunted Man doesn’t see his death as such, his spirit is deadened and resurrected, and two other characters seem to be on the verge of death before recovering. The writer (don’t recall who, sorry) claims that this makes them Easter Books rather than Christmas Books, properly speaking, but I’m not convinced that it doesn’t just make them Dickens books. Recalled to life. Esther Summerson’s near-death visions and resurrection. Walter Gay, in Dombey and Son. And there’s Mr. Dorrit’s release from debtor’s prison, described in terms not unlike resurrection.

Does this make them all Easter Books? Or all Christmas Books? Or is it peculiar to Charles Dickens that his emphasis on the Christian Story at Christmastime is about redemption rather than the manger and the star and that? It’s interesting (to me) to think about Mr. Dickens’s idea of Christmas (in the Christmas Carol, specifically, but in the others as well) in contrast with the Black Nativity of Langston Hughes. Mr. Hughes and Mr. Dickens are both concerned with poverty, with the life of the city, with the gap between the rich and the poor, and with love and grace. Mr. Hughes, however, makes the explicit association with the birth of Jesus; Mr. Dickens never says outright that we should see in the impoverished urban dwellers our potential Messiah. Nor is the grace, redemption and resurrection of his characters attributed to their personal acceptance of Jesus as the Christ, or a conscious attempt to imitate the Jesus of the Gospels. And yet the books seem to me (as an outsider) to be profoundly Christian books anyway, and Charles Dickens seems to me to be a profoundly Christian writer.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.