Free Charles Dickens by Jane Smiley Page A

at the Field Lane School disturbing, and he must have recognized the vast insolubility of the larger task no matter what he and Miss Coutts were able to do with her funds. He was halfway through a serialization that no one considered a success, and he was in conflict with his father and mother as well as with his publishers. Just as every literary character is the author in some guise, just as Ralph Nickleby and Daniel Quilp were “Dickensian,” so Ebenezer Scrooge was Charles Dickens, a man for whom money itself offered the prospect of safety, a man for whom isolation from the obligations of human relationship might be a form of peace.
    The story is familiar from countless renditions, takeoffs, and parodies. In fact, pirates began to appropriate Dickens’s characters and ideas immediately upon publication. But what makes A Christmas Carol work—what makes it so appealing a novella that William Makepeace Thackeray, Dickens’s most self-conscious literary rival, called it “a national benefit”—is the lightness of Dickens’s touch. Instead of hammering hismoral points home, as he does in Martin Chuzzlewit, he is content (or more content) to let his images speak for themselves. For example, when Scrooge returns home after business, he sees Jacob Marley’s face in his door knocker: “Marley’s face. It was not in impenetrable shadow, as the other objects in the yard were, but had a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar.” Subsequently, ascending his staircase, Scrooge sees a hearse in front of him, but he seeks no more light than that of his candle—“Up Scrooge went, not caring a button for that: darkness is cheap and Scrooge liked it.” After a further series of mysterious noises, which Scrooge declines to believe in, Marley himself appears, and Dickens’s description of him is economical but perfectly apt: “Marley in his pig-tail, usual waistcoat, tights, and boots; the tassels on the latter bristling, like his pig-tail, and his coatskirts, and the hair on his head. The chain he drew was clasped about his middle. It was long, and wound about him like a tail; and it was made (for Scrooge observed it closely) of cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel. His body was transparent: so that Scrooge, observing him, and looking through his waistcoat, could see the two buttons on his coat behind.” Not only are these details both picturesque and thematically evocative, they are conveyed without any overbearing tone of self-display. Melodrama (which Dickens loved) always carries a lack of conviction, because the gestures of the characters and the tone of the author overstate rather than understate the emotions that are being conveyed. Here, Dickens’s descriptions underscore Scrooge’s resistance to the implications of the scene,enhancing our sense of Scrooge’s coldness, but also his bravery. Additionally, it enables the reader to see what is happening more clearly than if Scrooge’s feelings cluttered the picture. Every line performs more than one literary function, something that is a hallmark of Dickens’s best writing. When he is trying too hard, every line performs less than one function, simply because he elaborates until he is sure the reader gets it. Immediately in the next paragraph, Dickens goes for a laugh—“Scrooge had often heard it said that Marley had no bowels, but he had never believed it until now.” Scrooge’s state of mind is believably mixed. He is observant, alert, frightened but incredulous, stubborn, ironic, and, most of all, interested. The scene is a masterpiece of narrative depiction, conveying simultaneously what is being seen, who is seeing it, and the narrator’s attitude toward it, as only narrative can do.
    Dickens took easily to the form of the novella, understanding intuitively that in focus and scope it is similar to a play but