Whether we are more inclined to “God bless us, every one”, or “Bah! Humbug!”, it is impossible to avoid the influence of Charles Dickens’s A Christsmas Carol. While it is an exaggeration to say that Dickens invented the Christmas aesthetic we now take for granted, he still exerts an outsize influence on our imaginations.
A Christmas Carol is wildly popular even with climate change activists, and it is easy to see why. People sometimes seem as little inclined to believe in the urgency of climate change action as Scrooge was to trust that greater joy lay in changing his miserly ways.
Yet if even Ebenezer Scrooge can change, perhaps there is hope for the planet. Or so the activists fervently wish.
When Dickens wrote the novella in 1843, he too had a much wider agenda than a parable about the reform of one individual. Victoria had become Queen in 1837. Her long reign saw famine in Ireland and accelerated urbanisation and industrialisation in Britain, including factories where men, women, and children worked brutally long hours in dreadful conditions.
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In 1833 a law was passed mandating no more than a 48-hour week for children aged nine to 13 working in factories. They were also to receive 12 hours a week of compulsory schooling. Although widely flouted, it was considered progress.
[ What the Dickens? A Christmas Carol is 160 pages of humbug at my expenseOpens in new window ]
Worse still were the conditions endured in coal mines by children as young as seven. Some were chained to carts full of coal which they drew on hands and knees through passages too narrow to stand upright in. (It was reported in the House of Commons at the time that for all their barbarous reputation, neither children nor women were employed in Irish mines.)
Having experienced destitution and working in a freezing, rat-infested warehouse sticking labels on bottles of boot polish when he was 12, Dickens was incensed when he read an 1842 report on child labour in the mines. He wanted to produce a pamphlet to beg people to improve the conditions of poor children, but instead wrote A Christmas Carol.
Not all his reasons were noble. He needed the money for his large family, especially after overspending on a US tour in 1842. He had hoped to persuade the US to stop pirating his work but his expensive tour was fruitless.
Though he was more a reformer than a revolutionary, his vision of children as more than mini-adults was radical. A couple of decades later in 1866, Karl Marx was suggesting merely that children aged nine to 12 should be limited to two hours’ work a day, in good conditions and with additional education.
In A Christmas Carol, Dickens instead proposes that the answer lies in employers becoming decent human beings who are generous to their employees, so that their children will not need to work.
The ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future are all important in Scrooge’s gradual change of heart but the two children hidden under the Ghost of Christmas Present’s cloak stand for all the abused children of the time.
A boy named Ignorance and a girl named Want are “yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility”. They are starved and undersized because “a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds”.
At this time of year, when cheap goods flood into our homes, it is hard not to wonder whether much of it was produced by small hands working long hours, or Uyghur slave labour, as the environment buckles under the cost.
Just as Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, climate activists argue that we must reflect on our past actions, acknowledge the current state of the environment and consider the potential future consequences of our choices.
[ Progress and success are not the same thing when it comes to climate actionOpens in new window ]
Yet fear is not enough to convert Scrooge. He is deeply touched by the example of others who radiate generosity and happiness, such as his nephew Fred, the Cratchits despite their poverty, and the Fezziwigs, Scrooge’s first employers.
The trouble may be that few of us identify with Scrooge, the misanthropic skinflint. Most of us may feel more like the Cratchits, struggling to make ends meet.
And yet our own grim ghost of Christmas Present in end-of-year reviews reminds us of catastrophic flash floods in Spain, Hurricane Milton which needed only one day in the Gulf of Mexico to develop from a tropical storm to the Gulf’s second-most powerful hurricane on record, and bigger and more dangerous wildfires in the EU.
The misused children are still hidden under the cloak of prosperity.
If we can heed what we see daily on our screens, we may also be able to declare in time with Scrooge that, “Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead, but if the courses be departed from, the ends will change.”
Empathy motivated Dickens to write A Christmas Carol, and empathy eventually converts his miserly protagonist. Here’s hoping empathy can be a tipping point in saving our planet.