“A Christmas Carol” isn’t a Christmas story, it’s the Christmas story. Iconic and constantly remade, it is indissoluble from the celebration of the birth of Christ in the Anglophone world. It exemplifies much of what we expect culturally from Christmas: selflessness, generosity, and reconciliation for the sake of togetherness.
However, it is impossible to argue that this is a Christian story. The competition for the Christmas story comes from one other contender: the origin of the feast itself. The story of the Christ child being born in a manger in what is now Palestine to Nazarene parents running home for the census, being visited by wise men and attended by ox and ass is the other one that everyone knows, in the Anglophone world and certainly beyond. Nearly all Christmas stories make clear reference or homage to the New Testament tale; even the kid in Home Alone attends mass and cuts through a creche on his way to do mayhem under the mistletoe.
But not “A Christmas Carol.” I am here to argue that we can read and enjoy this seasonal classic as a gently Pagan story, in a very similar festive spirit to that of Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather.
Scrooge and the Ghost of Marley by Arthur Rackham, pen, ink and watercolor, from Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, 1915. Public domain.
Author Charles Dickens was born in 1812 in Great Britain, but no record of his baptism to any faith is known. Biographers have a hard time pinning him down, religiously. The description that endures ascribes to his habits a “popular lay Anglicanism,” which is something most Pagans recognize, because many of us do our own version of it every day. It is difficult (and sometimes dangerous) not to mimic the religious tenor of public life in which we live. (Let she among us who doesn’t have a Christmas tree in her living room right now cast the first glass ball.)
Beyond affectation, Dickens expressed a general mistrust for organized religion, an admiration for Jesus Christ, and a social commentary that pointed out the corrosive effect of the Catholic church on personal liberty. Does this remind anyone else of every Pagan they’ve ever known?
All this speculation might sound dubious, so let’s get into some facts. The word “Christmas” appears 84 times in the roughly 30,000 word story. The name of Christ appears zero times. The word “Christian” appears only five times (more on that later!) But it’s not just what isn’t there that makes this feel like a Pagan story: it’s all that is!
In his introduction to the original 1843 novella, Dickens called his “A Christmas Carol” his “ghostly little book.” With that description, we begin. The first ghost we meet is Jacob Marley, main character (dare we say hero?) Ebeneezer Scrooge’s former business partner. After Marley, we meet the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet-to-Come. The figure of the past is indistinct, shifting constantly in shape and form so that Scrooge never sees it plainly, as memory can do. It shows Scrooge his own history with Christmas, attempting to untangle a young man’s disappointments from an old man’s bitterness and meanness of spirit. This is a ritual journey into one’s younger self; Victor and Cora Anderson couldn’t have done better by this guy with a past-life regression.
A colourised edit of an engraving of Charles Dickens’ “Ghost of Christmas Present” character, by John Leech in 1843. Public domain.
The second ritual journey is a lot more fun. Christmas Present is a huge jolly fellow, all in green and greenery. Merry and focused on merriment, the ghost carried a rusted and rotted sheath with no sword in it. This ghost shows Scrooge that there are good times all around him: good food, good friends, and tables at which there is a seat for him to enjoy both.
If this figure strikes the reader as Pagan-coded, there’s a reason for that. Nineteenth century England was in the middle of a Neoclassicist revival that showed up in every art form: paintings, architecture, theater, literature, even fashion. The fashionable Dickens is no different: it’s why Scrooge’s Victorian home in nearly every adaptation is awash in Greek columns and Roman masks, why the girl whose heart he breaks is got up as a Phoenician in her curls and drapery, why Scrooge merely accepts the guardianship and guidance of those he addresses as “Spirit.” There is a melding in English literature of the period, though it is undeniably Christian, with a Pagan inheritance. The British believed themselves the heirs of ancient Rome, colonized and later Christianized as they were by that vast empire. The Enlightenment of the 18th century revived all interest in that period of their history, imagining that once before the much-maligned Middle Ages, there was a flowering of knowledge and science that might inform the progressive and aesthetically superior British mind.
I’m paraphrasing and editorializing a little, but it’s all there if you look. It’s the Ghost of Christmas Present, who is at least a Pagan spirit of unbridled enjoyment, if not a coy disguise of a god. Dionysus, perhaps.
Finally, the third spirit who comes to Scrooge doesn’t speak at all. It is a figure of death, “shrouded in a deep black garment, which concealed its head, its face, its form, and left nothing of it visible save one outstretched hand. But for this it would have been difficult to detach its figure from the night, and separate it from the darkness by which it was surrounded.” This spirit, as we all know, shows Scrooge his own death: his grave, the people who come to rob his bedchamber the instant the body is cold, and the consequences of his refusal to offer his employees a living wage with the death of the chronically ill child, Tiny Tim. Here, again, we have some similarity to a Pagan figure; this description matches that of Charon, the boatman of Greek afterlife who takes coins as payment to move souls over the Styx.
The spirits featured by Mr. Dickens are not Christian spirits, nor angels, nor messengers of the monotheists’ god. Scrooge doesn’t look for, or ever address any god. Moody in the night, he observes that his own hearth is “an old one, built by some Dutch merchant long ago, and paved all round with quaint Dutch tiles, designed to illustrate the Scriptures. There were Cains and Abels, Pharaoh’s daughters; Queens of Sheba, Angelic messengers descending through the air on clouds like feather-beds, Abrahams, Belshazzars, Apostles putting off to sea in butter-boats,” with no allegiance to or fondness for those stories. These are no more remarkable to him than figures of any other mythology, indeed he imagines each face pictured there as belonging to his dead friend, Marley.
Only three times does Dickens venture upon a description of Christianity in the text, and each may be ascribed to the aforementioned lay Anglicanism rather than to belief. He suggests that donations of food and money might bring “Christian cheer,” to someone’s “Christian name” (synonymous at that time with one’s given or first name), and to any persons’ “Christian spirit,” knowing its own limited time on this earth.
Oaths, too, are only gently Christian in Dicken’s tale: he puts “god save you,” “god love it,” and “god bless us” into the mouths of his characters without ever invoking the name of a god, a prophet or an avatar. These are incidental, cultural oaths, and any Pagan might use them.
In the absence of a particular god, we may find space for many of them. In a story that’s about including everyone in a generosity and community before it’s too late, I find there is ample room for all the Pagans who came here for a good ghost story and are pleased as Fezziwig’s punch to find meaningful socialist values and no trace of unwanted dogma. The memorable closing line of this story is Tiny Tim’s heartfelt, “god bless us, every one.”
Every god. Every one. All of us together, in the warmth of a hearth where spirits may speak, if we invoke them right (or with our wrongs.)
Gods rest ye, merry Pagan folk. Settle in for a reading and enjoy these tidings of comfort and joy.
The Wild Hunt is not responsible for links to external content.
To join a conversation on this post:
Visit our The Wild Hunt subreddit! Point your favorite browser to https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Wild_Hunt_News/, then click “JOIN”. Make sure to click the bell, too, to be notified of new articles posted to our subreddit.