A National Benefit:
Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol
Mark Gullick
Who can listen to objections regarding such a book as [A Christmas Carol]? It seems to me a national benefit, and to every man or woman who reads it, a personal kindness. — William Makepeace Thackeray, Fraser’s Magazine, 1844
Christmas is the most blessed festival of the year because it doesn’t concern us alone . . . — Friedrich Nietzsche, youthful diaries
It is a sad and sorry state of affairs that one of the remaining joys of Christmas is that its continued existence angers my enemies. The so-called “War on Christmas” is just one offensive in the wider war on white people, but it is a key battle, as it allows the Left to attack two of the things it most despises: the family and the child. That the Left adopts the Soviet attitude towards the family as a unit to be expunged in order to leave people more time and inclination to worship the centralized state in loco parentis is only to be expected. The war against the child is more complex because it is actually a war on childhood itself as a natural expression of innocence.
The Left hate childhood because it is part of the natural cycle they seek so feverishly to subvert. Because they are weak-minded, the Left strike out against and seek to pervert and subvert those they most resemble: children. Children, their very existence, are the rawest expression of nature’s purpose, and the Left despise nature because it happened without centralized state control (unless that happens to be the way you think about God) and because it was attended by a millennia-long meritocratic game which white men won. This opposition to nature also dovetails neatly with globalist plans for the West, hating and fearing nature as the globohomo crowd do, and partly explains the global Left being in estrus about transhumanism, a comic-book philosophy for immature men.
One of the ways in which hatred can be meted out is despoliation, and the Left have paid an eroticized level of attention to the ruination of childhood, from the fear and timidity engendered by the manufacture of a pandemic, through the false devils of racism and the phobias, to the malevolent instillation of perverted sexual norms into malleable and therefore vulnerable minds. The sexualization of children is not the same thing as the recognition of sexuality in children, however. The following diaristic excerpt from an essay on infantile amnesia shows an awareness of sexual phenomena in infancy dating from over a century and a quarter ago:
As early as 1896 I had already emphasized the significance of childhood for the origin of certain important phenomena connected with the sexual life, and since then I have not ceased to put into the foreground the importance of the infantile factor for sexuality.
Even those on the Right who pace the floors of their rooms long into the night fulminating about Jews will recognize that Freud makes a valid contribution (to ontogeny as well as phylogeny), and is investigating cultural areas which are of necessity sensitive. This is the very sensitivity on which the modern pedophile vampires prey, those classroom perverts who want innocence destroyed as their (post-) modern version of épater les bourgeois. For all their manifestoes and martial singalongs, the Left only ever had one motto: Let’s spoil the whole holiday as long as it annoys Daddy.
And, of course, Christmas is a holiday which is under attack, the whole institution paying for its essential whiteness by being intentionally deflated in the United Kingdom and America just as the “minority” religions are receiving a cultural boost. The only problem there was that blacks were not even sophisticated enough to have a festival celebrating life, and so one had to be invented. Happy Kwanzaa, everyone. Here’s another excuse to shoot and stab one another, O black people, in case you were running short.
So as the provisional wing of the elites hack their way through all that remains of joyfulness and the celebration of life and its cycles, as their work of destruction proceeds through the form with epic dispatch, all we can do is remember the childhood wonders of Christmas, like sadder, wiser adults going through old toys in a dusty attic. One of these is Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Every year I surprise myself by the fact that I have never read this most famous of English novels, and I have read all of Dickens’ novels with the exception of Martin Chuzzlewit. This year, I elected to give myself an early Christmas present.
I am sure that outlining Carol’s plot can’t count as a spoiler, particularly if you are from the old country, imprinted as it is in the English-speaking psyche. Ebenezer Scrooge is a miserly old curmudgeon we first discover at the funeral of Jacob Marley, his lately deceased business partner. Marley’s burial, however, is not the last Scrooge will see of his colleague (as the delightful opening line states, “Marley was dead, to begin with”), who visits him in spectral form to warn that he will be visited by three further spirits: those of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. A terrified Scrooge buckles up for the ride, and we are treated to one of literature’s most famous stories of the supernatural.
An old man, tired of life and made to rue his default personality — one of miserliness, unhappiness, and the worship of money — comes to the realization that there is more to life than his bitter, avaricious solipsism. Dickens has created the greatest arc of development of them all: the translation of a husk of a human being into the genuine article through the compassionate recognition of his fellow man. How moving in today’s theater of Mammon in which we find ourselves, dictated to by Untermensch who should be as dead as Marley.
Stylistically, Dickens was the master of two prose devices difficult to perfect but unforgettable on the page. The first is the power of the metaphor or analogical image. Thus, Scrooge pronounces that “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on their lips should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.”

You can buy Mark Gullick’s Vanikin in the Underworld here.
He is obsessed with money, or rather that portion which is not yet under his control. “What’s Christmas to you,” he demands, “but a time for paying bills without money?”
Given today’s personal debt crisis, Scrooge undoubtedly underestimated the problem, but his essential meanness is encapsulated in the brilliantly evocative, seven-word policy which led the old miser to light no candles or lanterns in his abode: “Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it.”
This is Dickens, of course, and so we are in the genre of the moral homily. In Scrooge’s case, his moral lesson involves scenes from his own life, past, present, and future. This narrative within a narrative is one of several aspects of A Christmas Carol which allies it with its transatlantic cousin It’s a Wonderful Life, and Dickens’ central message is that what a person does in life is the imprimatur of their moral being, not their relationship with the material and fiscal. It is pointed out more than once by other characters that Scrooge may be rich, but he does not seem to enjoy his life except at the expense of others. Scrooge points out that Marley’s ghost is chained:
“You are fettered,” said Scrooge, trembling. “Tell me why?”
“I wear the chain I forged in life,” replied the Ghost. “I made it link by link”, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?”
Anyone who has seen particularly early cinematic versions of Carol will be familiar with celluloid ghosts, translucent as though dusted with flower, but Dickens’ first spirit, the Ghost of Christmas Past, has more than a hint of the Lovecraftian about it:
[T]he figure itself fluctuated in its distinctness: being now a thing with one arm, now with one leg, now with twenty legs, now a pair of legs without a head, now a head without a body: of which dissolving parts no outline would be visible in the dense gloom wherein they melted away.
What the ghost has to show Scrooge, however, could not be clearer or more distinct. The old miser is transported back to his childhood and youth and shown the scenes of his innocence, of the sheer enjoyment children have for Christmas before the cynicism and materialism of adult life sets in – chronically, in Scrooge’s case. His ex-fiancée diagnoses a young man changing for the worse:
“You fear the world too much”, she answered gently. “All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach. I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one by one, until the master passion, Gain, engrosses you. Have I not?”
And so, like another iconic figure from English literature, Hamlet, Scrooge loses all his mirth, and the panorama with which the second spirit, or Ghost of Christmas Present, shows him is the life of ordinary people that very day. We visit the Cratchit family, and the famous little cripple, Tiny Tim, to see the humility of Christmas expressed as joy even in penury. For descriptive ability, technique welded to inspiration such that you can’t see the join, Dickens’ description of London streets at Christmas in this chapter is a gift all by itself. Dickens is, of course, the greatest of London novelists.
Finally, Scrooge knows all too well what the arrival of the last spirit portends:
“You are about to show me shadows of the things that have not happened but will happen in the time before us,” Scrooge pursued. “Is that so, Spirit?”
Suitably ethically softened up, Scrooge foresees both future and his own mortality. His paranormal odyssey over, Scrooge rejoins mankind a changed man, and we have changed with him, such is the genius of Charles Dickens.
There are many filmed versions of A Christmas Carol, the most famous to those of my generation being Alastair Sim and Alec Guinness in the 1951 version. There are also, for those of you who really do want a childlike Christmas, a Muppet Christmas Carol, starring Michael Caine, and an amusing take in Blackadder’s Christmas Carol in which Ebenezer Blackadder starts out as the soul of generosity and Christmas spirit until the ghost shows him that, if he continues his niceness, the future belongs to Baldrick (you have to understand the franchise to get that).
Christmas unites the white West — or it used to, which is why it is such a target for the spoilers and wreckers of the Left, those anti-nature, anti-joy Morlocks who don’t see why any white people, even and especially children, should enjoy any time of year, even Christmas. Blacks have been instructed to take no part in Christmas except in children’s books about black Santa and most current Christmas advertising. Christmas is or should be an expression of reverence for the state of childhood. The material-consumer complex has ensured over the decades that Christmas is devalued spiritually, and now the globalists have arrived at the battlefield to bayonet the corpses: the World Economic Forum, the burghers of Davos, the open-borders hysterics, the freaks and frauds of transgenderism, the ethnomasochists and mea culpists and oikophobes who hate you and your children because you are white. These grave-stalkers are all Scrooge, and Marley’s Ghost is nowhere to be seen.
And, on that cheery note, Merry Christmas. And, as Tiny Tim Cratchit says at Christmas dinner, “God bless us, every one.”
* * *
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12 comments
You don’t need to read A Christmas Carol. So many films and other productions, including the Mr Magoo one: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x55fqu0
I once tried to read all four of Dickens’s Christmas stories. The first was A Christmas Carol, 1842; followed by others with names like The Chimes and The Cricket on the Hearth (I forget one of the four). Dickens was competing in this with his friend and rival Thackeray, who also did Christmas books. Anyway, I found the Dickens Christmas books tedious and unreadable, with the exception of the first, which may be brilliant merely because Dickens was writing on spec and didn’t know where he was going, much as with his earliest novels.
No. You do need to read it.
If you read it with a learnèd mind, you see it’s a patent attack on Utilitarianism. Dickens was born in 1812 and wrote A Christmas Carol when he was 30. How relevant is the debate over Utilitarianism these days?
By all means read A Christmas Carol for its sentiment and entertainment, but its subtext is its animating key.
Makes one long for the return of the poor law and treadmill. And the union workhouses being in full vigor.
Just a small correction Mark. Alec Guiness starred as Marley in the 1970 musical version with Albert Finney.
If even Ayn Rand enjoyed Christmas, I suppose no one (on the Right at least) has any excuse for Scrooge-ism. From her 1962 Los Angeles Times column she notes why in typically Randian fashion:
“The charming aspect of Christmas is the fact that it expresses good will in a cheerful, happy, benevolent, non-sacrificial way. One says: ‘Merry Christmas’ — not ‘Weep and Repent.’ And the good will is expressed in a material, earthly form — by giving presents to one’s friends, or by sending them cards in token remembrance. . . .”
In my childhood there always seemed to be a new Christmas Carol on TV. I remember the Mr. Magoo one very well. Mr. Magoo had a TV show where he even did Shakespeare and Victor Hugo. It reminds me how much popular culture still had a foot in the door of high culture from time to time…alas, no more.
I always liked the movie Scrooge, the musical with Albert Finney. I thought the songs very fun and thoughtful, and I was in love with a girl, and transferred some of that to the musical. Now, I watch it and give it a 2 1/2. Not really bad.
What I note is how A Christmas Carol gets mixed into the P.C./woke world. The movie Scrooged, with Bill Murray, had its points, but I disliked the Bob Crachit character made into a black woman. Also noted on her fridge was a poster against Apartheid (big issue when the film was released), showing a white figure being stomped on by a mob of blacks.
Our local repertory theater in St. Louis is bringing back A Christmas Carol. The director of the rep is black, and, yes, most of the cast is black.
A couple of years ago they did a Jane Austen style musical…and half the sisters and their husbands were black. And you’re just expected to shrug it off.
I think A Christmas Carol succeeds in part because it is a ghost story, as ghost stories were always a Christmas (solstice) tradition. Henry Jame’s The Turn of the Screw is in this tradition. In olde England, a Christmas ghost story was very much part of the Yule tradition, dealing as it did with the solstice and the need for light to help keep darkness at bay. Dickens certainly knew what his story would be about, although as a Londoner, he was quite out of the rural tradition, but bits of it lingered in the cities.
I like A Christmas Carol, and it can make me sniffy, but an unbeatable Christmas movie is Eyes Wide Shut. Not to mention The Lion in Winter, with a medieval royal family at Christmastide plotting, raging, sniping and suspicious of each other all the while giving smiles and gifts. Sounds like my Christmas past.
Yes, “A Christmas Carol” is tremendous. For those of you have access to old TV shows I highly recommend something closely related. It is the best episode of the best TV series that was ever made. It is season 1, episode 11 of “The Andy Griffith show” and is called “A Christmas Story”. The main character (in this case a guest character) is clearly patterned after Scrooge. His name is even “Ben”. Andy and the actress Eleanor Donahue do a magnificent job of “Away in a Manger”. Andy plays his acoustic guitar and Eleanor sings. She is so beautiful and sings so well that it makes your heart melt. The song is written by one of the most famous antisemites, Martin Luther, although most people don’t know that.
I’ve always meant to read A Christmas Carol around this time of year, but it hasn’t happened yet. As for the movies, the Alastair Sim version is the best. Perfect atmosphere and the best ghosts. George C. Scott and Albert Finney versions are ok but not as memorable.
Talking about how things have changed, I first saw the Finney version in 5th grade back in the early 90s. Imagine a public schoolteacher showing their students a Christmas movie today. Also, the fact that we can watch these movies anytime now makes them a little less enjoyable then when they would unexpectedly pop up on TV in the last few days before Christmas.
When I was a child, certain films were shown on TV at certain times. Gone With the Wind made every other year, Mary Martin’s Peter Pan was yearly, and almost yearly was The Wizard of Oz. These were semi-events.
And of course all the Bible stuff…Ben-Hur, Ten Commandments, etc.
It’s A Wonderful Life was pretty much ignored until the 8o’s, when it started on TV and eventually became the sentimental epic it is now. It’s okay and thoughtful, so I’ll grant it that, but I despise the TV style…a three hour long show where almost half of it is commercials and the usual look-how-happy-we-are-buy-our-stuff. I preferred watching the film at a local college, where you saw it in its original cut. It’s more human.
A little forgotten gem I like is The Joy of Bach, a PBS hour-long show about Bach shot for Christmas and narrated /acted by Brian Blessed. He plays a pretty good Bach, and the dramatics parts were filmed in East Germany. There are a lot of performers, and it’s kind of a hoot to see all the 70’s clothes and performers, as well as computer graphics. They really look primitive now, but it’s a nice, happy little holiday show. I got a VHS copy from Amazon.
We don’t meet Scrooge at Marley’s funeral. We meet him in his place of business.
Indeed there is no Marley’s funeral. “Scrooge knew he was dead? Of course he did. Scrooge was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend, and sole mourner…” And to paraphrase: he was an excellent man of business on the day of the funeral and sealed with a decided bargain.
Indeed.
On another note, the description of Fezziwig’s Christmas party may be among the highest peaks of nineteenth-century English literature:
“In came a fiddler with a music-book, and went up to the lofty desk, and made an orchestra of it, and tuned like fifty stomach-aches. In came Mrs. Fezziwig, one vast substantial smile. In came the three Miss Fezziwigs, beaming and lovable. In came the six young followers whose hearts they broke. In came all the young men and women employed in the business. In came the housemaid, with her cousin, the baker. In came the cook, with her brother’s particular friend, the milkman. In came the boy from over the way, who was suspected of not having board enough from his master; trying to hide himself behind the girl from next door but one, who was proved to have had her ears pulled by her mistress. In they all came, one after another; some shyly, some boldly, some gracefully, some awkwardly, some pushing, some pulling; in they all came, anyhow and everyhow. Away they all went, twenty couple at once; hands half round and back again the other way; down the middle and up again; round and round in various stages of affectionate grouping; old top couple always turning up in the wrong place; new top couple starting off again, as soon as they got there; all top couples at last, and not a bottom one to help them! When this result was brought about, old Fezziwig, clapping his hands to stop the dance, cried out, “Well done!” and the fiddler plunged his hot face into a pot of porter, especially provided for that purpose. But scorning rest, upon his reappearance, he instantly began again, though there were no dancers yet, as if the other fiddler had been carried home, exhausted, on a shutter, and he were a bran-new man resolved to beat him out of sight, or perish.”
And so on. A joyous celebration joy itself.
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