Christmas always brings a new film version, and a collection of old film versions, of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. It is worth reading the original 1843 story. It is about a hundred pages long and easy to follow, since most of the dialogue is familiar from the films. Some of the prose is a bit complex compared to the simplified grammar of our own times, but it isn't overpowering. If you like the films, you should enjoy the book.
The problem with A Christmas Carol is that we're so familiar with it that we don't readily see its limitations. The three-spirits, past-present-future motif has a certain fairy-tale charm, but it means that Scrooge's character is transformed by magic rather than by natural means. It has to be, given how exaggerated his selfishness is. It's hard to see how anything short of magic could work with him, and it's hard to see how magic so powerful could fail with anyone. It works on us, too - but because it is just magic, the effect doesn't last. The emotions we feel are based on heavy sentimentality, not on naturally developed convictions. The gratification in A Christmas Carol is too easy - it's really a children's story.
There are adult stories about the reformation of selfish people, and three of the better ones are quite short. One of the newest is R. K. Narayan's novel The Guide (1958, about 200 pages). One of the shortest is Tolstoy's short story "Master and Man" (1895, about 55 pages). George Eliot's novel Silas Marner (1861, about 200 pages) is a more difficult book but also more rewarding. In all three, the moral reform is natural and compelling.
R. K. Narayan's The Guide takes place in the south of India, in the fictional town of Malgudi where most of Narayan's work is set. The central character, Raju, a small merchant's son, finds it easy to make himself liked. When the railway comes his father is given shop space in the station and Raju spends more and more time there. He finds himself advising passing travellers, faking it at first until he gets a repertoire of local places of interest, but soon pleasing his travellers so well that he comes to be known as the guide to ask for - Railway Raju, they call him. He is sharp at sizing people up and estimating how much can be got from them, and soon he's a sort of general contractor, arranging drivers, accommodation, and pundits of various sorts for his tourists.
One of his tourists is a talented dancer for whom he becomes the promoter. The enterprise pays more and more, and Raju concentrates on it to the exclusion of almost everything else. He becomes self-important and careless, and breaks a law which gets him a two-year prison sentence. When he is released he has nothing, and he takes shelter in an abandoned temple. Local villagers think he is some sort of holy man, and he doesn't mind encouraging them with cryptic religious and philosophical talk. They bring him food and other necessities, and the role becomes his livelihood. Everything is easy until a drought comes and, through a misunderstanding, the villagers believe the holy man has undertaken to fast in order to bring the rains.
He cheats at first, eating food at night from a secret cache. He thinks about sneaking away, and there is no doubt that he could again find ways to support himself. But now he sees that people are depending on him, not as a guide to tourist sites or entertainment, but as a model of responsibility. He feels for the first time the satisfaction of "earnest effort," of "full application." It is an adult moral insight, presented in a splendidly quixotic way. Raju is no longer playing just a role by which he gets a living, but instead a role by which he belongs to a community. He finds both mental and moral health.
Tolstoy's "Master and Man" has the characteristic simplicity of Tolstoy's later years as a writer. It is the story of a merchant and his peasant servant driving their horse-drawn sledge in a snowstorm. The merchant has all of Scrooge's lust for money, the story takes place just before Christmas, and the merchant is redeemed at last, but that is the end of the resemblance to Dickens's story. The focus is almost exclusively on the two men, the horse, and the intense snow; there are no Dickensian distractions. We don't anticipate a happy resolution. A sense of doom is established early and grows throughout, barely balanced by the peasant's optimism. And the characters - the horse as well as the merchant and the peasant - have a concreteness that is foreign to Dickens.
Nikita, the peasant, is mild and even humble during the main action, but he is no Bob Cratchit. He has been sober for two months after an episode of drinking in which he pawned his coat and boots. Once, we learn, when he was drunk at home, he took out his wife's best clothes, "snatched up an axe, and chopped all her under-garments and dresses to bits." But most of the time he is pleasant, and in a joking rather than in a sentimental way - teasing the horse gently, for instance, and playing little games while he harnesses him.
Mukhorty, the horse, plays right back - "how carefully Mukhorty threw out his hind leg just to touch his greasy sheepskin coat but not to strike him." And Mukhorty, along with Nikita, serves the merchant well; they're both hardworking, trustworthy and respectful. The merchant begins to emerge by contrast even before we've seen much of him.
The merchant, Vasili Andreevich Brekhunov, is no lonesome Scrooge. He is quite a young man but already a church elder in his village, and he hosts friends and relatives for St. Nicholas's Day. But as soon as he can get clear of them, he has Nikita harness Mukhorty for an immediate drive to see a nearby landowner about buying a valuable grove of trees. He is worried that other buyers might get there first, and they set out in a hurry. Brekhunov is well dressed for the cold, in fur-lined coats, leather boots and mitts; Nikita has only his old mittens, a worn coat over a torn sheepskin, and a pair of felt boots with holes in them. And even as they are starting, there is a dark cloud, a cold wind, and whirling snow obscuring everything.
Brekhunov chooses a direct route over a better-marked one, but by the first turn it has started to snow and the wind is in their faces, and they are soon off the road. They meander through fields and back onto a road and eventually into a village where they are invited to stay the night, but away they go, the wind howling so they can't even hear the final directions they are given. Soon they're off the track again, and their only solution is to let Mukhorty have his head, and by and by they find themselves back in the same village. They stop in a house to get warm - Brekhunov has vodka, Nikita sticks to tea - and again they are invited to stay the night. The storm has got worse, and it is dark now; it's even hard to see the sledge in the yard; but again, Brekhunov insists on going on.
They get lost and end up in a ravine. Brekhunov is afraid. "What shall we do, then? We can't stay here! We must go somewhere!" Nikita is matter-of-fact. "I can't make anything out. It's too dark. There's nothing but ravines." He unharnesses Mukhorty and prepares as best he can to spend the night. Brekhunov can't control his thoughts. He reviews how successful he has been. He worries. "If only that peasant doesn't freeze to death! His clothes are so wretched. I may be held responsible for him. What shiftless people they are..." He thinks it must be nearly morning, but his watch shows only midnight. He hears a wolf. He unties Mukhorty and tries to ride away, but he falls off. He follows the horse, who returns to the sledge, where Nikita is now moving very slowly. "Give what is owing to me to my lad, or to my wife, no matter," he says to Brekhunov. "I feel it's my death. Forgive me for Christ's sake..." And at last Brekhunov sees what he has missed.
With George Eliot's Silas Marner we're back in England, though not in Dickens's mid-century London. The action of the novel takes place in a rural setting early in the century, "in the days when the spinning-wheels hummed busily in the farmhouses." The narration proceeds more slowly and with a great deal more digression than in the other stories. The contrast with Tolstoy is especially interesting, since in both cases we're in the company of two of the very best of the great realist writers. Tolstoy is invisible; George Eliot actively hosts her novel and offers curious morsels on nearly every page. You can race through Tolstoy if you like; with George Eliot you have to be patient.
As a young man, Silas Marner is falsely accused by a friend, loses his fiancée as a result, and has to leave his community. He settles in a distant village, Raveloe, as its weaver, and keeps to himself. Over the course of fifteen years both his isolation and his wealth increase until he is a wealthy miser and the next thing to a hermit. Villagers find him odd; some of them even wonder whether he is in league with the devil. Then one night all of his money is stolen. While he is still in shock - bereaved, almost - a young woman dies in the snow near his cottage and her tiny daughter toddles inside without Silas noticing at first. He gives her something to eat, then follows her footprints back and finds the mother. Carrying the child, he walks to the squire's house, where there is a festive gathering, to get the doctor.
He is told that one of the women will look after the child. No, he says. "It's come to me - I've a right to keep it." After the mother is found to be dead, he is expected to turn the child over to the parish - surely an old bachelor can't keep her. "'Till anybody shows they've a right to take her away from me." "The mother's dead, and I reckon it's got no father; it's a lone thing - and I'm a lone thing. My money's gone, I don't know where - and this is come from I don't know where."
He repeats this curious accounting, and Dolly Winthrop - a village woman who mentors him in parenting - not only accepts Silas's understanding but elaborates it. "It's like the night and the morning, and the sleeping and the waking, and the rain and the harvest - one goes and the other comes, and we know nothing how nor where. We may strive and scrat and fend, but it's little we can do arter all - the big things come and go wi' no striving o' our'n - they do, that they do; and I think you're in the right on it to keep the little un, Master Marner, seeing as it's been sent to you." It has a folk charm which is doubled for the reader, who knows the real causes of the going of the money and the coming of the child, which are indeed themselves connected.
As his love for the child - Eppie - grows, so do his relations with the surrounding community. Dolly advises him that Eppie ought to be christened. Silas's own religious background didn't include christening, "but I want to do everything as can be done for the child. And whatever's right for it i' this country, and you think 'ull do it good, I'll act according, if you'll tell me." "Silas began now to think of Raveloe life entirely in relation to Eppie: she must have everything that was a good in Raveloe; and he listened docilely, that he might come to understand better what this life was, from which, for fifteen years, he had stood aloof." And so, in place of the gold which isolated him, he dotes on Eppie and is connected to her and through her to the life around him.
In A Christmas Carol, the human connections that Scrooge achieves aren't connections with people who transform him. The Cratchits begin as nothing but examples used by the spirits; the spirits do all the transformative work. It isn't without considerable charm - we might be reminded of Shakespearean comedies where fairyland interludes provide magic, offstage solutions to recognizable human problems. But both cases involve a deus ex machina solution. Scrooge comes to love people because he is transformed by the spirits between dark and dawn. The new Scrooge comes as a pleasant surprise for Bob Cratchit, because neither Cratchit nor anyone else has had a hand in changing him. Raju and Brekhunov and Silas Marner are instead transformed because they come to love people. Christmas with Scrooge is emotionally easy, even cheap - but just for that reason, it's not as true a Christmas story.
We can relax to Dickens, and it's pleasant, but if we feel the expansive spirit of Christmas, we want more than that. England with its reformed Scrooge is a comforting collective memory, but indulging it doesn't move us forward. If you like The Guide, there are more than a dozen other little novels by Narayan that will expand your sense of India. If you like "Master and Man," there are half a dozen other stories by Tolstoy of roughly the same length and ease of reading, not to mention the works for which he is more famous. And if you like Silas Marner, you might think of looking at some of George Eliot's longer novels - perhaps at Middlemarch, which many people think is The Great English Novel. These books open new and natural worlds, adult worlds, that A Christmas Carol can't touch. Sticking only to Dickens is like sitting on Santa's knee once a year - a jolly experience for children, but that's all.
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