Dublin's Dickens (Part 2)

This is no place to consider the vast body of Dickens's work, but let's just think about the story the Dubliners were prepared…

This is no place to consider the vast body of Dickens's work, but let's just think about the story the Dubliners were prepared to turn out for that hot, August night in the Rotunda hospital. Muriel Spark, a modern novelist of great distinction, has said that the author should imagine she or he is writing a letter to a dear and valued friend. Dickens writes as though he were talking to us after dinner, in turns funny, bitter, eloquent, and sad. His voice is heard throughout the story, and he writes as though he was speaking and not constructing perfectly grammatical prose. Listen to this:

"The curtains of the bed were drawn aside, I tell you, by a hand. Not the curtains at his feet, nor the curtains at his back, but those to which his face was addressed. The curtains of his bed were drawn aside; and Scrooge, starting up into a half-recumbent attitude, found himself face to face with the unearthly visitor who drew them - as close to it, as I am now to you, and I am standing in the spirit at your elbow!"

A lesser writer would have crossed out the repetition of the curtains of his bed were drawn aside. Dickens wrote like a conversationalist making his point, keeping our attention riveted, always near to us. What is remarkable is the wild daring of the descriptive writing. Scrooge's house up a yard is so misplaced that "it must have run up there when it was a young house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses, and have forgotten the way out". He describes the onions in a greengrocer's shop as winking at the girls like fat Spanish friars. Dickens's voice is the most important in the story, and any dramatisation has to keep it for the theatre.

The Carol is also immortal because Scrooge is one of the great characters of fiction, worthy to stand beside Fagin and Micawber and Pickwick and Uriah Heep. He is certainly a villain through most of the story, but like Fagin he has a sense of irony and a kind of bitter humour; he's not a dull, monosyllabic villain like Bill Sykes. He has a certain courage and can invite ghosts to sit down or accuse them of humbug. When he denounces Christmas he does so with splendid hyperbole. "Out upon merry Christmas! What's Christmas Time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older and not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in 'em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you. If I could work my will . . . every idiot who goes about with `Merry Christmas' on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!"

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When the plight of the poor is mentioned he asks, "Are there no prisons? . . . And the Union workhouses . . . Are they still in operation? . . . The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour then?" And when a charitable gentleman suggests that many would rather die than go to the workhouse he says, "If they would rather die . . . They had better do it, and decrease the surplus population." The poor, he makes it perfectly clear, are not his business, which is entirely concerned with making money. Despite the lesson he was taught at Christmas, the politics of Ebenezer Scrooge are still a strong force for evil in the world.

The freedom of the writing is matched by the extraordinary freedom of the storytelling. Magic realism is no new conception. The pages of A Christmas Carol are filled with ghosts, spirits, and supernatural visions of Scrooge's past, the Cratchits' possible future, and the suffering of the world. When these great visions are punctuated by the simple domestic scenes in Bob Cratchit's house, the original artistry of the book becomes clear. It's by far the finest of Dickens's Christmas books, and nothing in the least like it has ever been written.

John Mortimer's adaptation of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol previews until Tuesday and opens on Wednesday at the Gate Theatre