ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, December 25, 1996 TAG: 9612260022
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-15 EDITION: HOLIDAY
COLUMN: Ray L. Garland
SOURCE: RAY L. GARLAND
PERHAPS THE best-known prose work in English is "A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens. It is a story that has everything: a poor but loving family with a crippled yet cheerful child; a miserly boss visited by three ghosts on his path to redemption; and, finally, as happy and morally uplifting an ending as the most sentimental Victorian could want.
It was published in 1843, when Dickens was 31 and just starting his brilliant career as novelist, magazine editor, lecturer and most celebrated popular artist of 19th century Britain and America. Yes, he was a hero to Americans, who gleefully pirated his works (there being no international copyright) and rapturously received him on his two long visits here to recoup what he could by giving lectures and dramatic readings. He even visited pre-Civil War Virginia, but found neither the company nor the slave society much to his liking. The constant expelling of tobacco juice got on his nerves.
In terms of reaching and moving a great audience, Dickens was our first entertainment superstar. Long in the public domain, free to any publisher or adapter, he has the rare distinction of never being out of print or failing to win an audience.
While I have yet to really take to Dickens the writer, though that may come in quieter years, if granted, I am fascinated by his life and times. He was in many ways the first true modern about whom so much is known.
Born in 1812, when the British were about to burn Washington and Napoleon had Moscow burned around him, Dickens awoke to a world of horse and wind power that would have been familiar to Shakespeare but was on the verge of the vast change of industrialism.
You can always measure the advance of modernity by the greater ease of communication. When Dickens was young, domestic postage was priced by distance and the average cost of sending a letter in the British Isles was 9 pence. With the pound then worth $5 and containing 240 pence, or pennies, that translated to about 18 cents. But if you consider that the value of money has depreciated about 95 percent, today's equivalent cost would be closer to $4!
In that great spirit of reform that drove Dickens and his time, the uniform penny post was established in 1840. It's no coincidence that the modern Christmas card dates from the same time. Prior to that, the British post office delivered about 125 million items a year. By the time Dickens died in 1870, it delivered almost 1 billion.
But for Dickens to succeed as a writer on the scale he did, there also had to be cheap paper and cheap printing. Until 1798, paper was made by hand, sheet by sheet. By 1812, the industrial production of paper had begun, though still costly by modern standards. In Dickens' heyday, the first printing of a large novel cost about $8, or more than $125 in modern money.
In 1800, the best hand-press could produce about 250 impressions an hour, on one side only. By 1814, using steam power and an early version of the German rotary press, The Times of London could print 1,100 impressions an hour. By 1850, it was producing 20,000 an hour, on both sides at once.
There you have it, an increasingly literate and affluent public ready for popular entertainment, and getting it by advances in industrial capitalism. Though always in the thick of change, Dickens never found much satisfaction in its works, which he habitually described as cold and merciless toward the poor.
The reasons aren't hard to find. His father, though clinging to respectability as an admiralty clerk, was always improvident and landed in debtor's prison when Charles Dickens was 12, where the family also took up residence in the custom of the time. The young Dickens was sent to work in a blacking factory, pasting labels on boot polish. He never forgot the poverty and humiliation of those days.
But five years later, Dickens had learned shorthand and was earning good money taking down cases in the law courts, then making a name for himself as a political reporter. By 24, he was a successful novelist and never looked back. In all, he wrote 16 novels and a vast catalog of stories and articles, also delivering hundreds of lectures and readings to packed houses in Britain and America. In sum, a man of prodigious intellect and energy, surely one of the most remarkable ever known.
But did he have the wrong end of the stick on Ebenezer Scrooge? Dickens describes him as a "squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner ... solitary as an oyster." If Scrooge deprived the Cratchits, he also deprived himself, gruel being a staple of his diet. Sentiment he despised: "Every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding."
Dickens doesn't tell us what Scrooge did with his money. He might have invested it in paper making or new printing presses, perhaps in one of those popular newspapers or magazines that were springing up, in which Dickens himself was so involved. Even his most conservative investment, in government bonds, might serve the common weal. Had he merely consumed it, or in generosity allowed others to eat goose instead of gruel, there would be a mite less capital to change a mainly subsistence rural kingdom into a great industrial power. Ah, you knew I'd come to politics sooner or later.
But Dickens uses old Ebenezer, which once meant a shepherd's crook or staff, to tell a moral tale of sin redeemed. Scrooge is born again, a better man: "It was always said of him that he knew how to keep Christmas well if any man alive possessed the knowledge." No bad epitaph. We face the same problem, to find personal meaning in a dizzily spinning world. It is here that the verities of Christmas, and even Dickens' genius for character, can help us.
Ray L. Garland is a Roanoke Times columnist.
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