Spiritual Values in Charles Dickens's Holiday Stories

The warmth of Dickens's happy endings and the joy he envisions as possible to everyone make his Christmas stories a cozy pick for reading beside a crackling fire this winter.

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Charles Dickens wrote a variety of novellas and short stories related to Christmas and New Year’s, many with a supernatural element. Though the plots differ, there are some themes that are common among them. In this article, I’ll deal with three such stories and highlight ideas that occur to some degree in all three.

Context

A Christmas Carol

Miserly Ebeneezer Scrooge is visited by four spirits. First, his former business partner, Jacob Marley, warns him that he will suffer forever in the afterlife if he doesn’t change his ways. Second, the Ghost of Christmas Past takes him back to the lonely Christmases of his childhood followed by the vibrant ones of his young adulthood, when he had friends surrounding him. Then, the Ghost of Christmas Present shows him how his poorer associates make merry by making the most of what they have. Finally, the Ghost of Christmas Future shows him his own death—alone, unmourned, pillaged by his employees. Scrooge must decide if and how to change his course.

The Chimes

Poor mail carrier Toby Veck is shown a potential future by the spirits of the chimes (who reside in the church bells) on New Year’s Eve. His daughter Meg, a cheerful and pretty young woman, had been planning to marry a joyful young man named Richard on New Year’s Day. The lovebirds encounter some doubt from the well-off men of the city. The Chimes show Toby what would happen if they let that doubt stop the wedding bells: Richard falls into alcoholism and both of them fall into poverty. Can he avert this disaster?

Cricket on the Hearth

Sweet, pretty young Dot is married to the older, kind, but not too bright carriage driver John. At Christmastime, they learn that Dot’s friend May is to be married to a man of John’s age but a much harsher, grumpier character: the toymaker Mr. Tackleton. John drives home a mysterious stranger whom the toymaker shows him is conversing closely—perhaps too closely—with his wife. John becomes convinced that his wife has fallen for the stranger, reflecting that Dot was snatched away from parties, general adoration, and freedom by her marriage to him. So John resolves to set his wife free from her obligation to him, which, he thinks, must be weighing her down. But the stranger reveals his identity, and the story ends with a merry Christmas dinner that includes everyone.

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Key Ideas

• Money isn’t an automatic pass to happiness

• Don’t let cynicism get in the way of your happiness

• Poor people are often doing the best they can

Money isn’t an automatic pass to happiness

“Scrooge” has become synonymous with a person who hoards money and shuns Christmas joy. Though some people genuinely appreciate money for what they can accomplish with it, whether grand-scale ventures and projects or the material luxuries it purchases them, Scrooge hoards every penny for its own sake. He doesn’t even spend enough to properly heat his office. The contradiction of his attitude—caring only about money but not being satisfied with it—is captured when Scrooge asks his nephew “What reason have you to be merry? You’re poor enough,” and his nephew replies, “What reason have you to be morose? You’re rich enough” (9).¹

The sympathetic portrayal of Scrooge’s employee’s crippled son, Tiny Tim, and an emphasis on charity throughout indicates that Dickens places a high value on materially helping others. But a key scene that the Ghost of Christmas Past shows Scrooge indicates that that’s not all that matters to Dickens. In the scene, Scrooge is a young apprentice, and his boss has thrown a charming Christmas party. Scrooge dances with his friends all night, has a perfectly jolly time, and experiences a deeply felt gratitude toward his boss. The Ghost points out that the boss had spent very little money on the party, to which Scrooge replies:

He has the power to render us happy or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome; a pleasure or a toil. Say that his power lies in words and looks; in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to add and count ‘em up: what then? The happiness he gives is quite as great as if it cost a fortune. (34)

So it is both a change in attitude toward others generally and in how he spends his money that makes Scrooge’s character arc. Though we might quibble with Dickens’s method of using a combination of pity and fear of dying alone to move Scrooge to this more benevolent, charitable frame of mind, it’s also clear that Scrooge is much happier at the end. The same is true of the grumpy toymaker, Mr. Tackleton, in The Cricket on the Hearth, who learns to be more friendly with his neighbors. The theme is also echoed in The Chimes, which features main characters who are happy though poor, and secondary characters who are wealthy and important but miserable. As philosopher Ayn Rand put it, “Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.”² This is a lesson echoed through these Christmas stories.

Poor people are often doing the best they can

Dickens is known for his sympathetic portrayal of poor people; in the introduction to the Wordsworth edition of his Christmas Books, scholar Cedric Watts noted that “sympathy with poor, downtrodden and disadvantaged people” was among Dickens’s earliest and most enduring literary characteristics (ix). This sympathy is present in all three stories. In A Christmas Carol, Bob Cratchitt (Scrooge’s underpaid employee) and his family have an extremely merry Christmas despite having very little money and a crippled son. In The Cricket on the Hearth, the toymaker has a poor employee with a blind daughter, both of whom serve little other plot purpose than to be cheerful and loving despite their circumstances. And in The Chimes, Toby, Meg, and Richard are happy and generous despite having so little that entertaining a guest means someone goes without tea, taking in vagabond Will Fern and his orphaned niece without a second thought.

Will Fern serves not only as an example of the goodness of most poor people, but clearly acts as Dickens’s mouthpiece in protesting what he deems unfair legal treatment of such people. As the character points out, often those who are imprisoned for petty crimes then find it nearly impossible to get out of the cycle of poverty and sometimes unintentional law-breaking. In Toby’s vision, Fern comes uninvited to a large party held by the city’s leaders and gives a speech condemning it:

See how your laws are made to trap and hunt us when we’re brought to this [poverty]. I tries to live elsewhere. And I’m a vagabond. To jail with him!...I goes a-nutting in your woods, and breaks–who don’t?—a limber branch or two. To jail with him! One of your keepers sees me in the broad day, near my own patch of garden, with a gun. To jail with him! I has a nat’ral angry word with that man, when I’m free again. To jail with him! I cuts a stick. To jail with him! I eats a rotten apple or a turnip. To jail with him! It’s twenty mile away; and coming back, I begs a trifle on the road. To jail with him! At last, the constable, the keeper—anybody—finds me anywhere, a-doing anything. To jail with him, for he’s a vagrant, and a jail-bird known; and the jail’s the only home he’s got.” (132-133)

Stirring and pointed though this speech is, Fern does almost nothing else in the story, and the entire scene feels like a contrivance to insert Dickens’s political views.

Don’t let cynicism get in the way of your happiness

In The Chimes, Meg and Richard are deeply in love and have decided to get married even though they are desperately poor, rather than waiting to save up a tiny bit of money. Statistician Mr. Filer, who reminds them of all the ways marriage can go wrong, makes them doubt this plan. Such a cynical comment shouldn’t bother them, but Toby is shown visions in which it does. In the visions, the young couple give up a loving marriage and mutual support for unfounded worries, which would have repercussions for the rest of their lives.

Similarly, in The Cricket on the Hearth, the cynical Mr. Tackleton is ready to believe the worst of the stranger John has driven into town on very little evidence. John initially lets that doubt creep into his feelings toward his wife, but after thinking about it for hours, lets his low self-esteem get the better of him and decides that he’s the one in the wrong—and is willing to give up his loving marriage as a result. The theme is less present in A Christmas Carol, since Scrooge displays more antipathy toward others than cynicism, but the overall message that emerges from all three stories is that if you’re open to the value that others can bring and take a benevolent attitude, you’re more likely to be happy than if you perpetually doubt and suspect others’ motives and actions.

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Conclusion

Politics aside, Dickens’s Christmas stories encourage benevolence, generosity, and a healthy attitude toward money—treating it neither as a good in itself nor as evil, but as a tool. He writes vividly, bringing to life a variety of characters in a short time. The warmth of his happy endings and the joy he envisions as possible to everyone make these stories a cozy pick for reading beside a crackling fire this winter.

1. Footnotes throughout this article come from the 1995 Wordsworth Classics collection entitled Christmas Books.

2. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, Penguin Publishing Group Kindle edition, 411.