The Great Humbug Irony

by Dave

I’ve said before that Victorian Era novels (whether British or American) have always left me cold. It may be a failing on my part, but if you put passages from Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, Henry James, or the Brontes in front of me, I’d have a difficult time distinguishing between them. Dickens has always been one exception to this rule. Hard Times was the one novel in my British Victorian Literature course as an undergraduate that I could truly lean into. Dickens was ahead of his time — nothing new in that statement. But he addressed the injustices of his day in a way that gives his readers hope, yet without falling into the mire and sap of sentimentality. His contemporaries and literary inheritors seem to me to always fall into one those traps. His ability to combine humor, pathos, and cutting observation are unequaled. His closest counterpart, I think, is obviously Mark Twain. I’ve always wondered a bit at the coincidence that these two most perfect satirists should find their audiences at roughly the same time, address very similar subject matter, and do so in remarkably similar fashion, but with their own distinct cultural and national flavors. I have no idea if Twain and Dickens ever met, but, if they did…can you imagine the conversation? especially if they knew they had an audience? I think the closest analogy I can imagine is putting Mel Brooks in the same room with Monty Python — Lone Star and the Holy Grail, with Dark Helmet as the Black Knight.

I’m not sure of the last time I read A Christmas Carol. It may even have been in high school. Thus, I never paid a ton of attention to the finer points of Dickens’ crafting of the story. Scrooge seems the classic, miserly Victorian villain in many ways. The natural symbolism tagging along behind him is something echoed in much Vicotrian literature, especially within poetry. One of my favorite Victorian poems is “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” by Robert Browning. In it is this passage:

So, quiet as despair, I turned from him,
That hateful cripple, out of his highway
Into the path he pointed. All the day
Had been a dreary one at best, and dim
Was settling to its close, yet shot one grim
Red leer to see the plain catch its estray. (43-48)

The use of the natural symbolism here foreshadows the trials to follow Browning’s eponymous hero. The “one grim/Red leer” is a ray of the sun casting about, ironically invoking a symbol of warmth and heat to lay out some potential, unnamed dread — very similar to Sauron’s eye atop the Dark Tower of Mordor — I’ve always wondered if Tolkien took this image from Browning’s poem.

Dickens always follows Scrooge around with similar effect. Particularly, we might examine this passage (for a written version, try here):

External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty. Foul weather didn’t know where to have him.

The passage is one of many markers demonstrating Scrooge’s self-inflicted withdrawal from all that lives and breathes around him — a reiteration of the earlier observation that Scrooge has “never painted out Old Marley’s name” from the sign to the counting house, and that Scrooge will answer to Marley’s name as well as his own, and that “it was all the same to him”. Dickens frontloads his story with all kinds of clues to Marley’s coming part in the narrative. That the narrator feels compelled to open his narrative with “Marley was dead” might as well be a bright neon sign shining across London in an age of gas-fuelled streetlamps that Marley will return, that his death is important, and that the state of his “shade” will be impressed upon our dear Ebenezer.

But Scrooge’s insistence upon “humbug” gets to the point of Scrooge’s inward character. The word has morphed into a catchphrase in modern pop culture, along with Scrooge’s name. So much so that I doubt too many people consider its actual denotive meaning — something that is a fraud. And in Scrooge’s worldview, a “fraud” is the worst possible thing. As a money counter, Scrooge’s occupation hints at the materialism driving his character. Marley’s ghost calls him a “Man of the worldly mind” upon first confronting Scrooge’s skepticism. Dickens confronts his character with the most thoroughly materialized version of death and despair possible. Scrooge can hear and see the ghost, yet chooses to argue to himself that acknowledging it “would play [...] the very deuce with him.” Yet, before Marley vanishes, Scrooge is calling his dead “friend” by his first name and looking around his own feet for phantasmal chains like those burdening Jacob.

Dickens characterization of Scrooge is something that many of his contemporaries would have had difficulty fathoming. He allows for Scrooge to change. In many ways, and perhaps due to the fame of the story, it’s not the eventual change in Scrooge that catches my eye as a reader; but I’m enthralled with how Dickens maneuvers Scrooge through that change and makes it believable in the end. The “choice” idea comes back into play, but in a manner, so far, more consistently subtler than the one Rowling tends toward. It’ll be interesting to see how Dickens fleshes this idea out through the rest of the story.