Christmas Carol

Gearing up for the last class of term: here are some perspectives on Dickens' Christmas Carol for you. We've already mentioned in class what Elliot L. Gilbert (in his essay 'The Ceremony of Innocence: Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol', PMLA, 90:1 (Jan., 1975), 22-31) calls 'the Scrooge problem':

Edmund Wilson stated that problem succinctly and dramatically in his well-known essay “The Two Scrooges”: ‘Shall we ask what Scrooge would actually be like if we were to follow him beyond the frame of the story? Unquestionably he would relapse, when the merriment was over—if not while it was still going on—into moroseness, vindictiveness, suspicion. He would, that is to say, reveal himself as the victim of a manic-depressive cycle, and a very uncomfortable person’ [Wilson] … there is a discontent in even the most positive emotional response of the serious reader to this book. It is a discontent arising from the obvious disparity between the way in which moral and psychological mechanisms operate in the story and the way in which they seem to the reader to work in the ‘real world’.

Gilbert says some interesting things about this 'disparity'. Also worth your time is Audrey Jaffe's 'Spectacular Sympathy: Visuality and Ideology in Dickens's A Christmas Carol' [PMLA, 109:2 (Mar, 1994), 254-265], which has interesting things to say about the visual dimension of the text; and Ruth Glancy's slightly wider-ranging 'Dickens and Christmas: His Framed-Tale Themes' [Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 35:1 (Jun, 1980), 53-72].

I also asked you to go see the Zemeckis film version, in part because I want to talk about the cultural currency of the text. I went to see it myself (and blogged my reaction); namely, that although I was a little put-off by the advanced publicity, in the end I was pleasantly surprised by the film itself.