Today, almost two centuries after it was written, A Christmas Carol is almost a cliché. Most of us can recall some version we have read or seen in picture books or movies. It’s often portrayed as a light, moralistic tale about the importance of giving, especially at Christmas. But A Christmas Carol is a much darker story than many recognise, perhaps not traditional noir, but definitely a walk into the meaner streets of London.
In the preface of his novella, Dickens wrote: “I have endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it.”
Despite Dickens’s intention to write a pleasant, good-humoured story, the inspiration for his work was anything but. In 1843 Dickens read a damning parliamentary report about child labour. The report detailed the horrors of poverty and hard labour endured by small children who worked in England’s mines, factories and mills. A Christmas Carol was a response to this report, rushed into print for Christmas of that same year.
The novella is essentially an allegory about the consequences of selfishness. It tells the story of a miserly man, Ebenezer Scrooge, who is visited by the spectre of his long-dead business partner, Jacob Marley, on Christmas Eve. Marley tells Scrooge he will be visited by three more spirits – The Ghost of Christmas Past, The Ghost of Christmas Present, and The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. The spirits take Scrooge on a tour of the hardships of the world he is living in, including those endured by the family of his clerk, Bob Cratchit. After witnessing the suffering of others, Scrooge is forced to face the effects of his mean-spirited ways and emerges from the evening a changed man.
While the parliamentary report provided the impetus for his novella, Dickens was already aware of the hardships faced by many families, and especially children, in his time. Though born into a comfortable middle-class home himself, he had been thrust into poverty as a child after his father became bankrupt and was sent to debtors’ prison. Aged twelve, young Charles was forced to help support the family by working ten-hour days in a blacking factory, where he sat in a window putting labels on pots of blacking used to clean boots.
Dickens remained haunted by these experiences as an adult. They may have even been the cause of the chronic insomnia he suffered and his habit of compulsive walking. These habits nevertheless allowed him to explore the streets of London, especially at night, and gain a unique perspective on its most vulnerable inhabitants. He visited all types of neighbourhoods on his night walks, but was particularly drawn to the poverty-stricken slums, known as rookeries. There, thousands of families crammed into filthy, unsafe housing, in narrow, poorly lit streets. Dickens was troubled by the lives of children growing up in these slums and feared that without more schools, the city would become, “a vast hopeless nursery of ignorance, misery and vice; a breeding place for the hulks and jails”.
Dickens also visited the Field Lane Ragged Schools in Clerkenwell, a charitable organisation run mostly by volunteers. Ragged Schools tried to offer children a basic education, as well as meals, clothing and washing facilities. The children Dickens saw at Field Lane ranged “from mere infants to young men” and included fruit sellers, match sellers, homeless children, thieves and beggars. The visit put faces to the children Dickens had read about in the parliamentary report.
A scene towards the end of A Christmas Carol, is said to be directly inspired by his visit. In it, the Spirit shows Scrooge two children huddling beneath its robes, “yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish”. The boy, explains the Spirit, is “Ignorance” and the girl is “Want”. The spirit warns, “beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy…”
Dickens intended A Christmas Carol as a warning against ignoring the suffering of others, but one that also provided an optimistic message about the possibility of transformation. The story became an instant hit and established the idea of Christmas charity toward those less fortunate. Social reform in the Victorian era was slow, but Dickens is regarded as one of its popular instigators, a voice that prompted the nation to reflect upon its values. Dickens also put his money where his mouth was and funded ragged schools and other charitable institutions with profits from his book sales.
In 2020, during the coronavirus pandemic and a time of financial hardship for many families, the ghosts of England past returned. British footballer Marcus Rashford stirred the conscience of the nation by discussing the inhumanity of letting children go hungry and asking the government to help provide meals for the most disadvantaged. While not a novelist like Dickens, Rashford had a simple and powerful message, which also drew on his own experience of childhood poverty and hunger. He was similarly haunted by these experiences, even as he found success in his own domain. So maybe a little haunting can be a good thing, if it reminds us of the need to help those around us and inspires us to share this message.
You can learn more about Dickens’s London in this walking game I created for Questo: https://questoapp.com/city-games/londres-walking-tours/dickens-s-london-quest-in-test-mode
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