Free Charles Dickens by Jane Smiley Page B

offers a novelist the opportunity to explore a single idea in depth and, in a way, at leisure. He seems to have had no trouble controlling his natural expansiveness, which the serial form of publication both tested and encouraged. The musical model for the composition (not only are songs evoked in the title of the work, but each part is called a “stave”) gave him a sure sense of rhythm and symmetry. The style is free, but the freedom stays within the tight confines of the plot—the first bit, Scrooge in company, disdaining others, balances the last bit, Scrooge in company, welcoming others, while the three dreams, of course, fall into the utterly natural symmetry of past, present, and future—what Scroogehas forgotten, what he is missing, and what might happen if he persists in his misanthropic ways. The philosophy and psychology of A Christmas Carol are so familiar to us now that we forget that in Dickens’s own day, his views competed with much less sophisticated notions of the origins and effects of states of mind. Indeed, this idea—that shifts in objective conditions, such as wealth, social relationships, and class disparities, begin within the individual and are then manifested outwardly in material changes—runs counter to notions of materialism and determinism that were beginning to take hold among such political thinkers as Bentham, Marx, and Engels, who were at work in the same period. Karl Marx, in fact, seems to have been quite a fan of Dickens. But Dickens’s Christmas stories ( A Christmas Carol, The Chimes, and The Haunted Man in particular) are increasingly specific and pointed about where necessary social change must come from. It is not enough to seize power or to change where in society power lies. With power must come an inner sense of connection to others that, in Dickens’s life and work, comes from the model of Jesus Christ as benevolent Savior. The truth of A Christmas Carol that Dickens understood perfectly and bodied forth successfully is that life is transformed by an inner shift that is then acted upon, not by a change in circumstances.
    The conditions that so appalled Dickens constituted the major political and philosophical challenge of his era. The novel, like any other artistic form, makes an inherent philosophical assertion—that the mental life of the individual is worth anatomizing and that the disruptions that exist amongindividuals and between individuals and groups are understandable and soluble through individual transformation and action. Dickens expanded and expanded his canvas because he intuited that the complexities of the social dilemmas he was interested in could not be convincingly portrayed in miniature. Other thinkers, not novelists, had other ideas about the significance of individuals and individualism, but Dickens’s chosen form saddled him with a philosophical question he tried ardently to solve, both artistically and personally, for his entire life. The controversies that arise about Dickens’s real political views, in my opinion, arise primarily from the fact that a novelist always, and increasingly, sees the trees rather than the forest, and is naturally unsympathetic to a collective solution, while always more or less in favor of a connective solution.
    When the first six thousand copies of A Christmas Carol showed a very small profit, owing to the expenses of production, Dickens panicked. He wrote Forster, “Such a night as I have passed! I really believed that I should never get up again, until I had passed through all the horrors of a fever” (meaning a serious, delirious illness), and added, “I shall be ruined past all mortal hope of redemption.” He became convinced that he needed to remove his household of wife, sister-in-law, and five children to continental Europe, where they could live more frugally and where Dickens could write more travel pieces. Ackroyd points out that Dickens was afraid of