Stop Defending Scrooge. Sort of.

Recently I saw an article posted by the Mises Institute defending Ebenezer Scrooge’s character.  In point of fact there are at least two.  I find the notion of defending Scrooge to be kind of disgusting, but I had to understand their point, and I appreciate Misesian Economic theory, so I had to look at what they were saying.  The premise goes something like this:  Scrooge himself has committed no act of violence against anyone, nor has he been guilty of any legal infractions.  What he does with his money is entirely his business, and by being a successful businessman he has helped to strengthen the economy of his country.

That’s all true.  From a libertarian perspective, they’re totally right.  In fact I think that any reading of “A Christmas Carol” that sees Scrooge purely as a villain is missing the point, as the story is one of redemption.  Scrooge is not meant to be hated, but rather pitied.  He is a poor, miserable creature, who is capable of being, and indeed who is worth, so much more.  “A Christmas Carol” is really a character study of Ebenezer Scrooge, and a deconstruction of an archetype.  Were Scrooge a truly bad man, there’d be nothing to redeem.  I have always felt that a proper reading of that classic tale is that Scrooge is lost, and in need of recovery.  It is not his wealth that has led him astray, it is his disconnection from other people, but as we will discover in a little bit, his disconnection is a product of his upbringing, and isn’t purely his fault.  This is why his friend Marley comes to offer him a chance at redemption.  Because Marley knows Scrooge isn’t such a bad guy, as surely as he knows that Scrooge is on a bad road.

Charles Dickens, in fact, sets up Scrooge as a nasty man but as we follow his journey with the three spirits, we see the layers pulled back and learn the depth of Ebenezer Scrooge’s character.  He is wholly and fundamentally human.  He is sad, and lonely, and has shut out all emotion as much as he possibly can in order not to face the consequences of his life choices, and the point of the journey with the three is to replay those life choices and to see the man that he truly is, and the sum of those experiences which have so fundamentally structured his being.

One of the fundamental levels upon which I judge any adaptation of “A Christmas Carol” is the success they have in building Scrooge as a complex and compelling character.  Full disclosure, I have read the book many, many times since childhood and have watched numerous adaptations, but the one I gravitate towards (and the only one I own) is the 1984 TV movie starring George C. Scott.  In fact it is one of my favorite films, which seems an odd thing to say about a made for TV picture, but I consider it the definitive adaptation and find all others to be terribly substandard in every respect.

So, we are told at the outset, by Dickens, that Scrooge is basically unbothered by heat and cold, that foul weather has no effect upon him, and that he has no great love of mirth.  He doesn’t celebrate Christmas (or likely any holidays at all) and finds the whole business to be a farce.  This is where the nastiness of Scrooge’s character is brought to bear, though, because Scrooge’s nephew Fred Holywell stops by to wish him a Merry Christmas, and Scrooge tells him where he can go.

No, really.  Per Dickens:

“Don’t be angry, uncle.  Come!  Dine with us tomorrow.”
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.

The 1984 adaptation is the only one I’ve encountered that actually played that out:

“Come!  Dine with us tomorrow.”
“I’ll see you in Hell first, Fred.”

Then the two men collecting for the poor come to the office.  In the film they catch up to Scrooge at the stock exchange, which was just the film’s way of getting out of the office as quickly as possible for the sake of pacing.  In any case, they ask for donations and Scrooge tells them his tax dollars go to pay for various government programs – which of course are things like prison and workhouses, nothing that actually does any good.  Here the libertarian will probably tell you that the government shouldn’t take Scrooge’s tax dollars to fund these misguided programs, and I agree.  However, this is where we get into the fundamental flaw in Scrooge’s character.  If the government did not take Scrooge’s money, he would not have that excuse to deny contribution to the collection the two gentlemen are taking up.  But we have no reason to believe that Scrooge would treat them any differently, or give a substantively different answer.

After all, he treats his clerk pretty badly, he told his own nephew to go to hell, and he has just uttered the line, “if they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

That is NOT a nice man.  Which again, is no crime.  But this is the point of A Christmas Carol.  Scrooge is not a criminal, but he is a man who is lost, who is foundering, and if we care about him as a person, then we should want him to know kindness and love for his fellow man.  Dickens in fact makes a point of contrasting the clerk, Bob Cratchit’s journey home, with Scrooge’s own:

The office was closed in a twinkling, and the clerk, with the long ends of his white comforter dangling below his waist (for he boasted no greatcoat), went down a slide on Cornhill, at the end of a lane of boys, twenty times, in honor of its being Christmas Eve, and then ran home to Camden Town, as hard as he could pelt, to play at blindman’s bluff.

Cratchit seems a fairly young man, in the prime of his life, and he still knows how to enjoy himself.  Now for his employer:

Scrooge took his melancholy dinner in his usual melancholy tavern; and having read all the newspapers, and beguiled the rest of the evening with his banker’s book, went home to bed.  He lived in chambers which had once belonged to his deceased partner.  They were a gloomy suite of rooms, in a lowering pile of building up a yard, where it had so little business to be, that one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was a young house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses, and have forgotten the way out again.  It was old enough now, and dreary enough, for nobody lived in it but Scrooge, the other rooms being all let out as offices.  The yard was so dark that even Scrooge, who knew its every stone, was fain to grope with his hands.  The fog and frost so hung about the black old gateway of the house, that it seemed as if the Genius of the Weather sat in mournful meditation on the threshold.

In his surprisingly humorous and playful way, Dickens has made Scrooge’s house a metaphor for Scrooge himself: once playful and young, it got lost and is in now in a dark and forbidding place, and most of it is now devoted to business, save for the small suite that Scrooge himself lives in.  Think about the power of that metaphor.  That’s why Dickens is regarded as a master.  All work and no play have made Scrooge a very dull boy, his presence as dour and forbidding as the “black old gateway” of his house.

Of course Dickens has another motive, as well, because the creepy old “pile of building up a yard” is the perfect setting for a ghostly encounter – or two or three – Marley’s face on the door knocker, the hearse on the broad stair, and finally Marley’s full apparition in the apartment above.  But Marley speaks, in somewhat evasive language, of having brokered this opportunity for Scrooge:  “I am here tonight to warn you, that you have yet a chance and hope of escaping my fate.  A chance and hope of my procuring, Ebenezer.”  Again proving that Dickens does not consider Scrooge a villain as such, for Jacob Marley, his friend, cares deeply enough for him to barter on behalf of Scrooge’s soul.

The journey that follows with the three spirits, tracks Scrooge’s path, like the metaphor of the anthropomorphic house, from playful child to morose adult, and the story is a sad one.  With the Ghost of Christmas Past, we learn that Ebenezer was sent away to boarding school as a child and spent his holidays there, unwelcome at his father’s house, alone with his books and his imagination as all his friends were gone home.  We also learn that, years later, as he stands on the cusp of manhood, that his father sends for him at last.  In the book he doesn’t come himself, though, he sends Scrooge’s younger sister, Fan, to fetch him in a coach and bring him home.  She tells her brother:

“Father is much kinder than he used to be, that home’s like Heaven!  He spoke so gently to me one dear night when I was going to bed that I was not afraid to ask him once more if you might come home; and he said Yes, you should; and sent me in a coach to bring you.”

That picture is rather bleak.  Ebenezer’s father clearly is none too fond of the boy, and one wonders why; and just beneath Fan’s talk of their father’s kindness is the fact that she had to ask him if Ebenezer should come home.  If she had not, perhaps the poor fellow would have been left at that school to rot.  The 1984 adaptation I hold in such high regard, elaborates on that just a bit, saying that Scrooge’s mother had died in childbirth and that his father blamed him.  This would make Fan a half-sister, but I like where it takes Scrooge because it puts an exclamation point on his father’s disdain for him, and why their relationship is broken.  And that broken relationship is so important to who Scrooge is.  The film then goes a step further, in having the father waiting in the coach when Fan fetches Ebenezer, so the moment of hope and joy is immediately trampled by his father emasculating him and telling him he isn’t coming home for long, but is to go off to apprentice straightaway.

Later, in another flashback, newly-minted businessman Scrooge sits talking to his fiancée, Belle.  She breaks off the engagement, saying that “another idol has displaced me; […] a golden one.”

Ebenezer emplores her:

“This is the even-handed dealing of the world!  There is nothing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!”

She rebukes him:

“You fear the world too much.  All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach.  I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one by one, until the master passion, Gain, engrosses you.”

Or, to put it perhaps more plainly: Ebenezer was a good kid but he had a tough childhood, and as he has grown up he has been running from that childhood, from his fear of failure, from the specter of his father’s wrath.  And as we now know is so often the case with abusive relationships, the victim became like the abuser, slowly, over time; Ebenezer’s goodness was supplanted by his father’s cruelty.  Without this foundation, the journey with the spirits of Christmas Present and Future (or Yet-to-Come!) would be meaningless.

At least one of the Mises Institute articles used a quote from Fred Holywell during the Christmas Present sequence to set up its argument:  “His wealth is of no use to him.  He doesn’t do any good with it.”  However they left out the next sentence:  “He doesn’t make himself comfortable with it.”

Indeed, Fred repeatedly says that he bears Scrooge no ill will, that “his offenses carry their own punishment.”  And so they do.  Throughout his visit with the Ghost of Christmas Present, Ebenezer experiences three basic lessons.  The first is, he sees the Cratchits at home, and how happy they are despite not having much, and how one of their children is sick and lame, and Scrooge notes that he could possibly help this child with the means he has at his disposal.  Secondly, he sees other examples of this throughout England, with people he doesn’t know, doing kindness to one another, or making merry in difficult situations, understanding that happiness is not strictly tied to wealth.  And then he sees Fred and Janet, and their friends, and sees what he is missing out on by not accepting his nephew’s invitation.  He also sees that his nephew genuinely wishes him well, and that his invitations are not a trick nor an insult but a genuine desire to share the warmth and love of family.  He is also reminded that Fred bears a strong resemblance to Fan.  As it was Fan who brought him home from school, Fan who interceded on his behalf with their father, so it is Fan’s son who constantly reaches out to him.

Then, of course, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come guides him through the remains of his life after he has died, if his course remains unchanged: Scrooge’s only legacy being that people joke about him and sell his personal belongings on the black market; that the Cratchits’ son has died and a gloom has settled over their once happy home, and the strain it has placed on their marriage.  In other words, despite his success, Ebenezer Scrooge’s only legacy was one of failure, of squandered potential.  It’s that realization that changes his heart; he is, after all, not such a bad man, down deep inside.  He is merely frightened, and lonely, and how he has seen that the price of fear, is death.  Scrooge, after his redemption, doesn’t give away his riches and go live in a commune or anything.  He just realizes that he can’t take his wealth him, so he might as well enjoy it, and be a blessing to others where he can, and let happiness, rather than emptiness, rule his life.

In effect, “A Christmal Carol” was never intended to be an indictment of wealth, but rather an indictment of fear and separation.  Scrooge’s offenses do carry their own punishment.  And thus the story is not about sparing the world of Scrooge’s offenses, but sparing Scrooge of their consequences, and this can only be done by changing his heart, by awakening the basic goodness and humanity in his broken heart.

If you don’t agree on that count, you need to revisit the book.  Or watch a better adaptation.  I can recommend one.