Getting into the Dickens spirit

'A Christmas Carol' is an exhortation to remember the ignored underclass that still exists in our cities, writes John Mortimer

A few weeks ago, Lambeth Council in London decided that the lights switched on in the last weeks of December should no longer be called "Christmas Lights" but must be known as "Winter Light" or "Celebrity Lights" in future. In the minds of these latter-day Scrooges, these politically correct bureaucrats, Christmas is something to be ashamed of, and to be suppressed because it might embarrass or offend those with other religious beliefs, or perhaps none.

Oh how I wish that Charles Dickens was alive to attack such idiots with the eloquent mocking of his most satirical prose. Perhaps he would send his spirits to cure the misguided councillors of their tiptoeing fear of making any reference to the joy and good fellowship we find in Christmas. In any event, A Christmas Carol should be made compulsory for them all so that they may know what Christmas is and Christmas can be and why it must be celebrated always.

Dickens's approach to Christmas is not notably religious. It is full of anger at the condition of the poor, the abandoned, the uneducated children and the helplessness of urban poverty. Dickens made these feelings essential to his particular and generous brand of Christianity. Always remembering this, his Christmas is a time of joy and good fellowship, of laughter and dancing and sending a huge turkey over to the family of the faithful clerk who, if you happen to be a Scrooge, you may never have fully appreciated.

But in spite of all the jollity, the celebrations, the peeling bells and the vegetables and fruit winking at the shoppers, Dickens wouldn't have forgotten to tell the councillors that Christmas is above all a time for remembering the poor, ignored underclass which still exists in all our cities. In fact, these thoughts provided the original impulse for the writing of A Christmas Carol.

He presided at a meeting of the Manchester Athenaeum, an organisation dedicated to bringing education to the children of the "labouring classes". There he made a speech full of anger at the condition of thousands of poverty-stricken, ignored and uneducated children condemned "not to what our great poet called the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire but one of jagged flints and stones laid down by brutal ignorance".

The lives of such children ended in crime, disease, jails and early death. Dickens was 31 at the time and already a hugely popular novelist. He intended to write a book which would tell his better-off readers the truth about the world they lived in. He would give them a magic story of ghosts, spirits and comic memories of childhood and growing up. He would present them with the archetypal grumpy old man, Scrooge, whom he would gradually turn into an acceptable human being. But he would never let them forget that concern for the poor is part of the true spirit of Christmas.

The deprived are there in A Christmas Carol in the shape of two terrifying children, Ignorance and Want, "yellow, meagre, scowling and wolfish". The spirit tells Scrooge to beware of these two children but particularly of the boy "because on his forehead is written Doom".

In spite of his original intention, Dickens can't help giving us the joys of Christmas, its celebration of happiness and pleasure, as well as concern and generosity. In his unreconstructed past, Scrooge once thought that it was "A time for paying bills without money. A time for finding yourself a year older and not an hour richer". So Scrooge was at one with the London councillors in his dismissal of Christmas, and the story brings him to his senses. At first it's done by whisking him back into his past, to the Christmas when he was apprentice to Mr Feziwig, who asks, "With our cake and our negus. With our cold roast and our cold boiled, with our mince pies and our beer. With our fiddler, an Artful Dodger", how could anyone fail to be happy? So Mr Feziwig leads everyone into the dance, in which even the young Scrooge joins.

At the end of the story Scrooge's lesson is learned. He wakes up on Christmas morning with feelings of appropriate joy: "No fog. No mist. Clear. Bright. Jovial. Stirring. Cold. Piping for the blood to dance to golden starlight. Heavenly sky. Some fresh peeling bells. Glorious."

So that is Dickens's Christmas. A season of peace and goodwill and humane concern. It's a religious festival which preserves traces of its pagan origin. It should be a time of pleasure and un-politically correct behaviour, a time for moderate binge-drinking and eating anything that government health departments say are bad for us.

It might also be a good time to send Dickens's spirits after the members of Lambeth Council to show them the proper meaning of Christmas.

Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, adapted by John Mortimer, returns to the Gate Theatre from tomorrow