Over the next five posts, I will be looking at Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, a wonderful story about the dramatic process to effect one man’s complete change of heart. Dickens arranged the novella into five chapters or staves, as he labeled them. “Stave” has its roots in the word “staff,” as in a musical staff, and his carefully chosen term reminds us that Dickens really did envision this work like a musical piece, a carol that could illuminate some of the meaning attached to the season of Christmas.  Each post will look at one stave and some of the beauty and meaning wrapped up in the words.

Stave One
Houses, like people, can lose their way. At least that’s what Charles Dickens seems to think. In his novella A Christmas Carol, stave one–or chapter one–of the story introduces us to Ebenezer Scrooge, a gloomy, self-absorbed miser finishing up business on Christmas Eve in Victorian England. The setting matches the interior of Scrooge’s soul. The weather is “cold, bleak, biting” and carries with it fog that comes “pouring in at every chink and keyhole,” wrapping the entire neighborhood in an eerie blanket hardly fitting for Christmas Eve. As Scrooge trudges home, we are told that he approaches his “gloomy suite of rooms. . . that one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was a young house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses, and have forgotten the way out again.” This simple analogy with the accompanying scenery reveals just how desperate of a case Scrooge will be. Whatever Scrooge was as a child, he is no longer. He is just as cold and dark and out of place as his rooms on a late December night. 

That he has lost his way is confirmed when Jacob Marley’s ghost visits Scrooge later that night. A reader familiar with the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament may notice some similarities between Marley’s visit and the parable of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16. Readers for generations have speculated that Dickens used this parable as the seed for his own story with a lesson. In the biblical telling, the rich man suffering in eternal punishment asks if Lazarus–the poor man who is resting in paradise–may go to his family to warn them of their impending punishment. The rich man is refused. It would appear that Dickens has reimagined the parable at that moment. Instead of being refused, the rich man, or Marley, is granted permission to go himself to warn those closest to him: Scrooge, his business partner in life. 

Marley has arranged for Scrooge to receive instruction about the path he is on–where he came from and where it will lead him–all in the hopes of helping Scrooge escape the same fate as Marley. This tale has already started us on a journey that looks markedly different from anything we can find in the biblical parable. Dickens’ imagination roams free, allowing us to see just what it would be like to have a spirit from another realm provide moral instruction. It is a more terrifying and heart-rending journey than Scrooge can possibly be prepared for at this moment in the story. In fact, as soon as Marley leaves him, Scrooge falls into bed and is immediately overcome by sleep. He will need sleep because the way out of his self-manufactured prison and back to wholehearted living will take nothing less than a complete life change.