We’ve seen movie versions, television versions, and stage adaptations of Dickens’s famous story. We have had the story read to us and in turn have read it to others.  Like people all over the world, we have been haunted by the mean, miserly character of Ebenezer Scrooge, which makes us think, amidst the gifts and treats of our own holiday seasons, about mortality and the basic human imperative to act charitably toward fellow humans so that our lives have meaning.

In You’ve Got To Read This, an anthology of fiction writers’ favorite stories edited by Ron Hansen and Jim Shepard, John Irving introduces A Christmas Carol by describing his experience watching it in India, surrounded by Hindu families in the Great Royal Circus.  “The children’s favorite ghost story,” Irving remembers the chief trainer of the child performers exclaiming. Stuck by the amazing hold the story had over children who never celebrated Christmas, Irving wrote this summary of the story’s compelling theme, “We had best improve our capacity for human sympathy–or else! We must love one another or die unloved.”

Dickens’ theme is, of course, a grand one, but like in all good story telling, the universal lesson for readers is received embodied in the protagonist’s human responses and behavior (albeit in this case to other-worldly agents). As writers, by imitating Dickens’ style, we can learn much about how to develop theme from characters and their situations.

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In the first chapter of A Christmas Carol, Dickens provides his narrator’s introduction to the material:

Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge’s name was good upon ‘Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

 Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Scrooge knew he was dead? Of course he did. How could it be otherwise? Scrooge and he were partners for I don’t know how many years. Scrooge was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend, and sole mourner. And even Scrooge was not so dreadfully cut up by the sad event, but that he was an excellent man of business on the very day of the funeral, and solemnised it with an undoubted bargain.

John Irving points out that, “An editor of today’s less-is-more school of fiction would doubtless have found this repetitious, but Dickens never suffered a minimalist’s sensibilities; in Dickens’s prose, the refrain is as common as the semicolon.” (You’ll see those if you read the whole story.)

Dickens continues:

The mention of Marley’s funeral brings me back to the point I started from. There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate. If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet’s Father died before the play began, there would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts, than there would be in any other middle-aged gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy spot — say Saint Paul’s Churchyard for instance — literally to astonish his son’s weak mind.

We the audience, adults and children alike, enter a world we probably don’t want to enter.  But the voice of Dickens’ narrator compels us with its repetition to enter–dead, dead, dead, dead, he repeats four times in the first four paragraphs of the tale he is warming up to tell us.  We must hear the story; it is important, the repetition calls out. In 1843, Dickens wrote this preface:  “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.”

Perhaps it seemed important from the start to lighten things up for readers, let them know from the start that the story will end well, haunt them pleasantly, and turn bad into good. The narrator, though focused on telling us a tale of death and ghosts during the season we experience the most darkness and most crave the light, tells us many times that Marley is dead, that this matters. We are told, I think, to make us sit still and take in a lesson that is important.  When we are told other writers, such as Shakespeare, have relayed what ghosts have brought to the human mind and strivings, we think of our own mortality, how we, too, will be dead. “What difference will this story make to our lives?” we wonder as we become hooked. It is Dickens’ sense of craft that allows his narrator to tell the reader from the start that we are to take this ghost story most seriously.  He continues:

Scrooge never painted out Old Marley’s name. There it stood, years afterwards, above the ware-house door: Scrooge and Marley. The firm was known as Scrooge and Marley. Sometimes people new to the business called Scrooge Scrooge, and sometimes Marley, but he answered to both names. It was all the same to him.

Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas.

External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty. Foul weather didn’t know where to have him. The heaviest rain, and snow, and hail, and sleet, could boast of the advantage over him in only one respect. They often came down handsomely, and Scrooge never did.

Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with gladsome looks, “My dear Scrooge, how are you. When will you come to see me.” No beggars implored him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him what it was o’clock, no man or woman ever once in all his life inquired the way to such and such a place, of Scrooge. Even the blindmen’s dogs appeared to know him; and when they saw him coming on, would tug their owners into doorways and up courts; and then would wag their tails as though they said, “No eye at all is better than an evil eye, dark master! ”

But what did Scrooge care! It was the very thing he liked. To edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance, was what the knowing ones call nuts to Scrooge.

Can you conceive of writing such a portrait of someone?  Even if your character is not as scroogey as Scrooge, and even if the character you focus on does not harbor as much against humanity or even one person as Scrooge does when we meet him, try giving Dickens’ kind of description a try.

First, introduce your character’s situation by talking about someone else’s situation in the way Dickens’ spoke of Marley. Here’s what I did as a freewrite, with the sound of Dickens’ narrator still in my ears:

Priscilla was divorced. There was no doubt about that since the dissolution of her marriage appeared in the town newspaper. Fred was reading it over coffee.  He thought, “Priscilla is alone. Priscilla, who I loved in high school. Priscilla, who didn’t say yes to me even once all those years.”  He imagined her hiding in her house, as lonely, he thought, as a kite.

I don’t know why people say “lonely as a kite.” The sky over a park is sometimes full of kites, their edges rippling like the clothes of guests at a lawn party. I might think, as Wordsworth did, “lonely as a cloud,” an image of untouchable beauty.

Fred had thought for years that Priscilla might one day understand and accept him.  He had gone to college in filmmaking and made films inspired by his love for Priscilla, thinking that she would one day be in awe of his talent and come to him. Rather than date, he filmed documentaries on courtships.  People felt important when his camera was on them and flirtatious. People asked the shy young man to parties mostly because they wanted him to make them famous.

All through college, Fred wore flannel shirts and orange hunting vests he bought at surplus stores, but all that he hunted was at the library’s film collection, monitors and VCRs his companions.

Undaunted by the 15 years since high school graduation, which had seen him twice married and quickly divorced, Fred set out to call on Priscilla. He had no idea that calling on her would only dig him deeper into unhappiness. We must not skip in our minds to an impossible happy ending. Imagine how Wuthering Heights would have ended if Emily Bronte allowed Heathcliff to stop inflicting grief?

Surprised by the characters I put on the page so far by playfully imitating Dickens, and surprised by what I announced as my theme (grief may be what someone holds on to for inspiration and energy), I went back to A Christmas Carol and read on:

Once upon a time — of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve — old Scrooge sat busy in his counting-house. It was cold, bleak, biting weather: foggy withal: and he could hear the people in the court outside, go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their breasts, and stamping their feet upon the pavement stones to warm them. The city clocks had only just gone three, but it was quite dark already: it had not been light all day: and candles were flaring in the windows of the neighbouring offices, like ruddy smears upon the palpable brown air. 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. To see the dingy cloud come drooping down, obscuring everything, one might have thought that Nature lived hard by, and was brewing on a large scale.

Looking forward to using the environment to get more about Fred across on the page, I wrote:

Of all the days to be walking across the park, this was the hottest and most humid Fred had endured this summer.  He still wore his flannel shirt, though he passed kids in tank tops and short shorts and children under six with no tops on at all. Babies played and splashed themselves in the kiddie pool, while their mothers drank icy water from plastic bottles they’d put in the freezer overnight.  It was three o’clock in the afternoon and Fred could see heat drizzles rising from the black asphalt he walked on.

And I returned again to Dickens:

The door of Scrooge’s counting-house was open that he might keep his eye upon his clerk, who in a dismal little cell beyond, a sort of tank, was copying letters. Scrooge had a very small fire, but the clerk’s fire was so very much smaller that it looked like one coal. But he couldn’t replenish it, for Scrooge kept the coal-box in his own room; and so surely as the clerk came in with the shovel, the master predicted that it would be necessary for them to part. Wherefore the clerk put on his white comforter, and tried to warm himself at the candle; in which effort, not being a man of a strong imagination, he failed.

I worked on more fully imagining Fred on his walk across the park to Priscilla’s and what he would notice in the individuals he passed that could let me know more about Fred:

Fred stopped for a moment, wiping sweat from his brow. He unbuttoned his shirt.  He could feel splashes of sweat on his back making a pattern like pebbles in the gravel path he was getting to. He saw a boy raise his lower lip over his upper lip and blow a gust of air to push his wet bangs off his forehead.  Fred felt relief when the boy’s bangs lay flat and sticky on his forehead again. Things always returned to how they were.

I returned to Dickens:

“A merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!” cried a cheerful voice. It was the voice of Scrooge’s nephew, who came upon him so quickly that this was the first intimation he had of his approach.

“Bah!” said Scrooge, “Humbug!”

He had so heated himself with rapid walking in the fog and frost, this nephew of Scrooge’s, that he was all in a glow; his face was ruddy and handsome; his eyes sparkled, and his breath smoked again.

“Christmas a humbug, uncle!” said Scrooge’s nephew.  “You don’t mean that, I am sure.”

“I do,” said Scrooge. “Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry? what reason have you to be merry? You’re poor enough.”

“Come, then,” returned the nephew gaily. “What right have you to be dismal? what reason have you to be morose? You’re rich enough.”

Scrooge having no better answer ready on the spur of the moment, said, “Bah!” again; and followed it up with “Humbug.”

“Don’t be cross, uncle,” said the nephew.

“What else can I be,” returned the uncle, “when I live in such a world of fools as this Merry Christmas! Out upon merry Christmas. What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in ’em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will,” said Scrooge indignantly, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!”

“Uncle!” pleaded the nephew.

“Nephew!” returned the uncle, sternly, “keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine.”

“Keep it!” repeated Scrooge’s nephew. “But you don’t keep it.”

“Let me leave it alone, then,” said Scrooge. “Much good may it do you! Much good it has ever done you!”

“There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,” returned the nephew: “Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round  — apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that — as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!”

The rest of the story is of the protagonist’s personality change.  Though none of us are as full blown misanthropes as Dickens’ Scrooge, we recognize tendencies and the importance of the nephew’s point of view. We redeem ourselves in some ways after the story–we think more kindly, evaluate our positions on giving, smile more, or share some food with others. In the case of Fred’s story, we will see through his misery and wonder for ourselves how much of our own misery we cling to.

I turned back to my own developing story and wondered: What will become of Fred that will keep this from having a happy ending? Does Priscilla become interested in him, causing Fred to enter a zone where requited love requires more than melancholy, something he is not capable of?

I am interested in the character I produced who must stay miserable. At this point, I do not know how long it might take for me to fully write this story or if I will succeed as well as I think I can by following Dickens’ footprints, but I am enthused thinking about a character for whom misery is fundamental.  Many of us have had relationships with people who didn’t want to be happy. Many of us have played that role ourselves.

When I turn again to A Christmas Carol, Scrooge and his nephew are still talking:

“Don’t be angry, uncle. Come! Dine with us to-morrow.”

Scrooge said that he would see him — yes, indeed he did. He went the whole length of the expression, and said that he would see him in that extremity first.

“But why?” cried Scrooge’s nephew. “Why?”

“Why did you get married?” said Scrooge.

“Because I fell in love.”

“Because you fell in love!” growled Scrooge, as if that were the only one thing in the world more ridiculous than a merry Christmas.  “Good afternoon!”

“Nay, uncle, but you never came to see me before that happened. Why give it as a reason for not coming now?”

“Good afternoon,” said Scrooge.

“I want nothing from you; I ask nothing of you; why cannot we be friends?”

What, I think, might Fred and Priscilla say to each other when he knocks on her door? I’ll set about writing that next part of the story, relying on Dickens to provide the springboard I need to finish a draft.

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As Dickens’ story ends, Scrooge says to his employee who took Christmas off:

“I am not going to stand this sort of thing any longer. And therefore,” he continued, leaping from his stool, and giving Bob such a dig in the waistcoat that he staggered back into the Tank again: “and therefore I am about to raise your salary!”

Bob trembled, and got a little nearer to the ruler. He had a momentary idea of knocking Scrooge down with it; holding him, and calling to the people in the court for help and a strait-waistcoat.

“A merry Christmas, Bob!” said Scrooge, with an earnestness that could not be mistaken, as he clapped him on the back. “A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you for many a year! I’ll raise your salary, and endeavour to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop, Bob! Make up the fires, and buy another coal-scuttle before you dot another i, Bob Cratchit.”

Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did not die, he was a second father. He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms. His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him.

Although I don’t know yet how my story will progress, I do feel that as a writer, I have received more than a good story reading Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. I have found a road to travel. My journey on it will be in a different season and continent than Dickens and through different scenery, but I thank him for his story and road building and say to all of us who write, “… God Bless Us, Every One!”