(A Christmas post from 2018 I’m reposting)
Last year Greg Hatcher discussed why he loves A Christmas Carol despite a general distaste for Christmas because “someone finally convinces a rich asshole to stop being a jerk to everyone.” I don’t dispute that interpretation, but like a lot of classics, Dickens’ story carries multiple meanings. The one I’m writing about today is that Scrooge isn’t just a jerk to everyone around him — he’s a jerk to himself too. By the time we meet him, he’s devoted years to making himself completely alone and utterly miserable.
He rejected the woman he loved as an unprofitable investment. He cut off contact with his nephew because he thinks Fred ruined himself by marrying for love. As a young man Scrooge had love, family, friends and he let them all slip away. The only friend he has as an adult is Marley, and Marley’s seven years dead at the start of the story. Ebenezer’s redemption isn’t just about learning to treat other’s decently, it’s about realizing what he’s lost and finally reconnecting with the world.
That’s a theme that matters a lot to me. There have been stretches of my life where I felt cut off from everyone, completely alone, and unable to figure out what I was doing wrong. I couldn’t see any way to change it; at its worst, like the singers in “Thank You Very Much” (the Albert Finney musical Scrooge), “I never thought the future would be fun for me.” And I worried my own choices had led me to that situation; it was all my own fault.
Those stretches of despair passed. I’m happily married and the future which is now the present is way better than I thought it would be. I still remember the despair of feeling cut off, so watching Scrooge end his own estrangement from the human race gives me a real joy.
As covered in the excellent The Life and Times of Ebenezer Scrooge, a standard criticism of the book is that Scrooge has a god-given right to use his money in 
whatever way makes him happy. The flaw in this argument is that it doesn’t make him happy. His ex-fiancee Isobel called it: he’s afraid of the world and money is his security blanket (this is not the only interpretation possible of course).
With some screen Scrooges such as Patrick Stewart or George C. Scott, you can see they enjoy having money, but it’s a very narrow, limited kind of happiness. Yet they can’t seem to stretch to enjoy anything else; Ebenezer loves Isobel, but he’s happy to walk away from her rather than lose money supporting a household. As far as we know, he never sought marriage again (did he come to see any marriage as a bad financial deal?).
This may explain why he loathes his nephew Fred. “What right have you to be merry? You’re poor enough!” is how Scrooge dismisses his Christmas-loving nephew. Yet from what we see Fred is doing quite well, living what looks like a comfortable middle-class lifestyle, able to entertain a crowd of friends for Christmas dinner. Perhaps Uncle Ebenezer’s bitter, in part, because his nephew did what Scrooge didn’t have the courage to, and chose his heart over the bottom line (the Alastair Sim film explains the bitterness as Ebenezer’s beloved sister dying in childbirth).
Regardless of the reason, Fred and his wife are one more potential relationship Scrooge has willfully severed from his life. His only connection with people is monetary: those who do business with him and Bob Cratchitt working for him.
And then the spirits come. Scrooge comes face to face not only with the suffering around him that he’s been ignoring, or making worse, but with his own heart. He discovers he doesn’t want to die alone, doesn’t want to live alone. and so he changes.
It’s part of why I like Albert Finney’s Scrooge so much. At the start of the film he’s an utter misanthrope, far more miserable and bitter than Scott, Sim or Stewart; when he sees the light at last, he becomes completely jubilant. And nothing can express jubilation like a musical.
So every year I watch Dickens’ adaptations, TV Carol specials and oddball variations like 2004’s Chasing Christmas (Christmas Past quits his job in the middle of Christmas Eve, leaving Tom Arnold stranded on a visit to his own past). Sharing the joy of reconnecting matters enough to me I doubt I’ll ever stop.
One thing that I think most adaptations of Dickens’ classic miss is that the story isn’t about a miser learning the value of family and compassion; it’s the story of a man who thinks he’s a decent guy being confronted by the facts of what a terrible person he is and being broken by it. Scrooge doesn’t develop a social conscience, isn’t overcome by pity for Tiny Tim, and the horror of his coming demise isn’t all that terrible; what destroys him is hearing how his friends, family, employees, and neighbors talk about him and realizing what they all think of him.
Scrooge doesn’t think of himself as a miser, he thinks he’s responsible with his money. His tirade against Christmas is in his mind a hilarious comedy bit; he thinks he’s funny. He’s rich enough that people kowtow to him and restrain their reactions to his “jokes,” even forcing up a chuckle when necessary, to the point that he thinks he’s funny. He’s completely oblivious to the state of poverty in which the Cratchits live, because he has absolutely no idea how anyone outside his social level does anything. To him, Bob Cratchit’s failure to get his son the medical care he needs is an indictment of Cratchit’s parenting, not due to his own failure to pay his staff a decent wage. He has no idea how much a doctor charges, because he’s lucky enough to be healthy and never goes to the doctor.
One by one, all of the lies Scrooge tells himself about himself and his relationships are exposed, as are all of his points of deliberate ignorance, and he has to choose whether to accept the indictment or change who he is.
It’s not that he’s a miser, not that he’s callous to the needs of others. It’s that his self-image is that of a poor, abandoned and unloved kid who grew up to be a success, but still refuses to indulge himself with the material comforts he formerly couldn’t afford, has constructed an elaborate mythology to explain away why Belle left him and why he doesn’t like Christmas (it’s not because it’s frivolous or a waste of money, it’s because of being left alone at school over the holidays all those years ago), all of which come crashing down when he sees himself from the outside.
The point of the story is really that all of Scrooge’s later acts of kindness are the direct result, not of an appeal to his conscience, but to the destruction of his false self-image that allowed him to rationalize away all of he terrible actions; he can’t do those things anymore if he doesn’t want to be the person he saw in his visions.
I think Dickens was right: If we want a better world, we have to try to be better people.
I think Orwell’s right that Dickens strength is that he’s a moral reformer, not a systemic one (which ties into your last point). He’s not suggesting a change in labor laws (*which would probably be ancient history by now) he’s suggesting that yes, we be better people. Which is why some people resent the story — the very idea of saying “don’t fuck over your employees” upsets anyone who thinks anyone with power or money has a right to do exactly that.
I like your read of Scrooge as someone whose self-loathing has permeated outwards. A self-fulfilling prophecy of misery.
Has there been a version where the Scrooge just doesn’t learn his lesson at the end? I feel like that would be truer to life.
There’s been a couple of TV series Christmas episodes where the Scrooge figure stays rotten. And in “Christmas Carol II” (an episode of George Burns Comedy Show streaming on YouTube) the spirits return the following year because Scrooge is now so insanely generous he’s turning everyone around him into parasites. Fun show with a great cast — James Whitmore as Scrooge, Samantha Eggar and Roddy McDowell as the Cratchitts, Ed Begley Jr. as Tiny Tim Future (“I will no longer be known as Tiny Tim!”).