The Themes of A Christmas Carol

1 The Fancy of Imagination

Just before Scrooge's door knocker becomes the face of Jacob Marley, the narrator tells us the 'fact' that Scrooge had as little of what is called fancy about him as any man in the city of London, even including -- which is a bold word -- the corporation, aldermen, and livery. What is called 'fancy' here we would probably refer to as 'a creative imagination' or perhaps even 'the machinations of an inventive mind'. The story-teller though isn't quite giving us all the facts for later in the story we discover that Scrooge once upon a time had one of the most creative and inventive minds of any of Dickens' characters. Scrooge was playful, his imagination active and inventive; he lived in a world of fantasy and had, to borrow a famous line from Wordsworth, "that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude".

'Fancy' (imagination) is a major theme running through much of the work of Dickens. Writing in the first issue of his magazine Household Words (30th March 1850) Dickens set out in "A Preliminary Word" his views on the importance of imagination for his readers:

No mere utilitarian spirit, no iron binding of the mind to trim realities, will give a harsh tone to our Household Words. In the bosoms of the young and old, of the well-to-do and of the poor, we would tenderly cherish that light of Fancy which is inherent in the human breast; which, according to its nurture, burns with an inspiring flame, or sinks into a sullen glare, but which (or woe betide the day!) can never be extinguished. To show to all, that in all familiar things even in those which are repellent on the surface, there is Romance enough, if we will find it out: -- to teach the hardest workers at this whirling wheel of toil, that their lot is not necessarily a moody, brutal fact, excluded from the sympathies and graces of imagination; to bring the greater and the lesser in degree, together, upon that wide field, and mutually dispose them to a better acquaintance and a kinder understanding -- is one main object of our Household Words.

These words of Dickens are echoed in the closing lines of Hard Times, where we are given an insight into the values of Sissy Jupe from the circus as she grows up into adulthood: happy Sissy's happy children loving her; all children loving her; she, grown learned in childish lore; thinking no innocent and pretty fancy ever to be despised; trying hard to know her humbler fellow-creatures, and to beautify their lives of machinery and reality with those imaginative graces and delights, without which the heart of infancy will wither up, the sturdiest physical manhood will be morally stark death.

Had Ebenezer been son and heir to Sissy Jupe it is doubtful whether he would ever have become a 'scrooge', the lower case noun that ever since the Dickens story denotes miserliness and worldly isolation. His 'fancy', his creative imagination, would surely never have died under the loving care of Sissy Jupe.

Ebenezer Scrooge, though, did not have an idyllic childhood. Dickens tells us he spent his early life as a child away from home in a school. He was never even welcome at home during the holidays, including Christmas. But at least Scrooge had his 'friends' with whom to share his winter days. And when Scrooge is taken back to that lonely school room by the Ghost of Christmas Past, he once again meets those friends:

"Why, it's Ali Baba!" Scrooge exclaimed in ecstasy. "It's dear old honest Ali Baba. Yes, yes, I know. One Christmas time, when yonder solitary child was left here all alone, he did come, for the first time, just like that. Poor boy. And Valentine," said Scrooge, "and his wild brother, Orson; there they go. And what's his name, who was put down in his drawers, asleep, at the Gate of Damascus; don't you see him? And the Sultan's Groom turned upside down by the Genii; there he is upon his head. Serve him right. I'm glad of it. What business had he to be married to the Princess." Scrooge simply created his 'friends' from his reading. They became as real to him as the boys to whom he waved goodbye on Christmas Eve.

Dickens as the narrator then reminds his readers of the 'fact' that Scrooge had as little of what is called fancy about him as any man in the city of London by bringing to mind city folk: to hear Scrooge expending all the earnestness of his nature on such subjects, in a most extraordinary voice between laughing and crying; and to see his heightened and excited face; would have been a surprise to his business friends in the city, indeed. Dickens then follows the excitement of old Scrooge seeing the young Scrooge with a literary allusion to someone else who found himself isolated and alone:

"There's the Parrot." cried Scrooge. "Green body and yellow tail, with a thing like a lettuce growing out of the top of his head; there he is! Poor Robin Crusoe, he called him, when he came home again after sailing round the island. "Poor Robin Crusoe, where have you been, Robin Crusoe?" The man thought he was dreaming, but he wasn't. It was the Parrot, you know. There goes Friday, running for his life to the little creek! Halloa! Hoop! Hallo!"

These stories and books of Scrooge's were also favourites of the child, Charles Dickens. Numerous references to Ali Baba and Crusoe populate his writings. As so often with the leading player in the fiction of Dickens, there is much of the author in their character.

Exactly why Scrooge was neglected and kept permanently at school is never made clear, though Fan's reference to their father being so much kinder than he used to be suggests that Scrooge's father, rather like so many fathers in Nicholas Nickleby, preferred their children away from home, safely locked in a school that offered 'No Vacations'. At least though, Scrooge had had his reading and his imagination through those isolated years. However, and we are never told why, by the next scene from Scrooge's past some years later, Scrooge was not reading now. What we are told in an introduction to the scene, a description that suggests a sort of cinematic fast-forward decline over time, is that the room became a little darker and more dirty. The panels shrunk, the windows cracked; fragments of plaster fell out of the ceiling, and the naked laths were shown instead; but how all this was brought about, Scrooge knew no more than you do. He only knew that it was quite correct; that everything had happened so; that there he was, alone again, when all the other boys had gone home for the jolly holidays. Perhaps as with the untended room Scrooge's fancy and imagination simply decayed.

One way of looking at A Christmas Carol is to see it not as a fairy story with ghosts and time travel but as a re-awakening of that once great but now lost imagination of Scrooge. The awakening is slow but inexorable. The narration sets the scene with descriptions of buildings that are, as if, alive:

The ancient tower of a church, whose gruff old bell was always peeping slyly down at Scrooge out of a Gothic window in the wall, became invisible, and struck the hours and quarters in the clouds, with tremulous vibrations afterwards as if its teeth were chattering in its frozen head up there.

And even the fog helps in creating an atmosphere of invention: The fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was so dense without, that although the court was of the narrowest, the houses opposite were mere phantoms. It is no surprise, perhaps, when Scrooge begins to see things that are not there. Even an old door knocker.

When Scrooge does see Marley's face in the knocker we are told: To say that he was not startled, or that his blood was not conscious of a terrible sensation to which it had been a stranger from infancy, would be untrue. As Scrooge climbs the wide staircase to his rooms he thought he saw a locomotive hearse going on before him in the gloom. Half a dozen gas-lamps out of the street wouldn't have lighted the entry too well, so you may suppose that it was pretty dark with Scrooge's dip. A trick of the light is rational explanation but all the time Scrooge's mind is tipping more and more toward seeing things that aren't there or possible for a "man of the worldly mind", as Marley later calls him. And when Marley's ghost does arrive he continues to fight against his senses but, like Robin Crusoe, "the man thought he was dreaming, but he wasn't".

Just before the arrival of the first Ghost we are told Scrooge went to bed again, and thought, and thought, and thought it over and over and over, and could make nothing of it. The more he thought, the more perplexed he was; and the more he endeavoured not to think, the more he thought. Marley's Ghost bothered him exceedingly. Every time he resolved within himself, after mature inquiry, that it was all a dream, his mind flew back again, like a strong spring released, to its first position, and presented the same problem to be worked all through, "Was it a dream or not?" Throughout the whole of the next three sections we are constantly informed that Scrooge thought, or pondered, on what was happening. What is being reborn here, even if it is all a dream, is not just an imaginative mind but a thinking mind, capable of thinking about the past, people, responsibilities and a whole host of other issues that make one alive. For Dickens the creative imagination helps and leads to thinking of the broadest kind, a theme central to Hard Times where empathy for others and the creative imagination are so carefully interwoven.

As well as being a parable about social awareness and spiritual reclamation, A Christmas Carol is also about the importance of imagination in our lives. Had Scrooge never lost his power of fancy perhaps he might have kept alive the child within him that could laugh, play games and make merry. More importantly, imagination and the ability to create people would have given him an empathy for his "fellow travellers to the grave". Even if the Ghosts were all a dream, what a dream it was. It awoke his inventive mind, inspired him and brought him once again to 'life' through the power of thought, imagining and fancy.

Imagination and Social Conscience in Dickens' Hard Times

A piece in Household Words, entitled "The Amusements of the People," and written at the time of the Great Exhibition, summarizes the author's belief: "There is a range of imagination in most of us, which no amount of steam-engines will satisfy, and which The-great-exhibition-of-the-works-of-industry-of-all-nations, itself, will probably leave unappeased." Hard Times was serialized in Household Words in 1854. One of its main themes is fancy and how the ability to fancy connects you with the lives and feeling of others.

The famous opening sets out the non-imaginative factual education: "Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children."

Sissy Jupe, a child of the circus, who has been brought up on fanciful stories, is questioned as to what sort of pattern for a carpet she would choose. She suggests one with flowers. This does not go down well with the new educators of fact:

"You are not to have, in any object of use or ornament, what would be a contradiction in fact. You don't walk upon flowers in fact; you cannot be allowed to walk upon flowers in carpets. You don't find that foreign birds and butterflies come and perch upon your crockery; you cannot be permitted to paint foreign birds and butterflies upon your crockery. You never meet with quadrupeds going up and down walls; you must not have quadrupeds represented upon walls. You must use for all these purposes, combinations and modifications (in primary colours) of mathematical figures which are susceptible of proof and demonstration. This is the new discovery. This is fact. This is taste."

Louisa Gradgrind, daughter to Mr. Gradgrind, the believer in fact, has been brought up not to 'wonder':

When she was half a dozen years younger, Louisa had been overheard to begin a conversation with her brother one day, by saying "Tom, I wonder" -- upon which Mr. Gradgrind, who was the person overhearing, stepped forth into the light and said, "Louisa, never wonder!" Herein lay the spring of the mechanical art and mystery of educating the reason without stooping to the cultivation of the sentiments and affections. Never wonder. By means of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, settle everything somehow, and never wonder. Bring to me, says M'Choakumchild, yonder baby just able to walk, and I will engage that it shall never wonder.

Sissy and Louisa are friends. However, Sissy's new education, in fact, as is seen when Sissy tells Louisa, "For instance, Mr. M'Choakumchild was explaining to us about Natural Prosperity." "National, I think it must have been," observed Louisa. "Yes, it was. -- But isn't it the same?" she timidly asked. "You had better say, National, as he said so," returned Louisa, with her dry reserve. "National Prosperity. And he said, Now, this schoolroom is a Nation. And in this nation, there are fifty millions of money. Isn't this a prosperous nation? Girl number twenty, isn't this a prosperous nation, and a'n't you in a thriving state?" "What did you say?" asked Louisa. "Miss Louisa, I said I didn't know. I thought I couldn't know whether it was a prosperous nation or not, and whether I was in a thriving state or not, unless I knew who had got the money, and whether any of it was mine. But that had nothing to do with it. It was not in the figures at all," said Sissy, wiping her eyes. "That was a great mistake of yours," observed Louisa. "Yes, Miss Louisa, I know it was, now. Then Mr. M'Choakumchild said he would try me again. And he said, This schoolroom is an immense town, and in it there are a million of inhabitants, and only five-and-twenty are starved to death in the streets, in the course of a year. What is your remark on that proportion? And my remark was -- for I couldn't think of a better one -- that I thought it must be just as hard upon those who were starved, whether the others were a million, or a million million. And that was wrong, too."

Unlike Scrooge, Sissy never lost her ability to think beyond statistics to the world of the real people who are starved to death. Eventually, Scrooge will see through the fantasy of the worlds of the three Ghosts that people and not mathematics lie behind the equations of the educators of fact. Had he never lost his fancy as a child to create real people just from books he might never have lost the ability to see real people in the statistics in his newspapers.