What the Dickens?

digresssmlOriginally published January 22, 1993, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1001

Well, I’ve just had the pleasure of seeing noted actor Patrick Stewart performing one of the best pieces of science fiction I’ve ever seen.

Not Star Trek: The Next Generation, of course. No, most episodes are little more than wastes of Stewart’s time and talent. No, I’m talking about that science fiction classic that has been part of world literature since the middle of last century. Yes, that’s right: A Christmas Carol by master science fiction writer Charles Dickens.

What’s that you’re saying? A Christmas Carol is not science fiction? It wouldn’t make anyone’s list of top 10 SF stories?

I don’t see why not.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about A Christmas Carol lately. In preparation for taking the two older children to see Stewart’s one-man performance on Broadway, I read them the entire text over a week. It helped remind me of how my perceptions of the story changed over time.

When I was a child, for example–and my main exposure to the story was Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol–I didn’t understand who the story was about. Not what, but who.

Just as I thought that Disney’s Mary Poppins was about the title character when, in fact, it was really about the father (he’s the one who changes, after all), I thought A Christmas Carol was about Bob Cratchit. I found Bob and his family–and most of all, of course, Tiny Tim–to be far more accessible. This despite the fact that, in the book, Cratchit is merely one of a number of richly drawn and detailed denizens of Scrooge’s world, along with Fezziwig; nephew Fred; Scrooge’s lost love, Belle; and so on. A less important facet, in fact, considering that Bob’s not even named in the text for the first half of the book, but merely referred to as “the clerk.”

Nevertheless, Scrooge was to me, just as he was to Tiny Tim, merely a monster. I thought that the main reason for the visitation of the four ghosts was to change Scrooge, but with the ultimate goal being the saving of Tiny Tim’s life, not Scrooge’s soul.

It may well be that with recent feature film adaptations of the story, featuring such recognizable characters as Mickey Mouse and Kermit the Frog in the role of Cratchit, a new generation of viewers might get the same impression.

Which is fine. Children find their own entry points into stories.

But as adults, we should understand that A Christmas Carol is, of course, one of the great SF stories–speculative fiction, if the “science” aspect is too stringent for you–of all time.

Now, we know it’s not a psychological horror story. That implies that maybe it really happened or maybe it was in Scrooge’s mind.

But that doesn’t hold up. Scrooge, in his forays through his life, becomes privy to all sorts of information that he could not possibly have had. I doubt that he was familiar with Cratchit’s family, and I’m positive that he could not possibly have known the friends of his nephew, Fred–yet he meets them on his sojourn and everything he encounters is borne out. No, beyond question, it happened. But what happened?

You could claim it was a simple ghost story. And if the entire tale had centered around Ebenezer being terrorized in his house by the ghost of the deceased Jacob Marley, I might swallow it.

But the vast majority of A Christmas Carol involves a plot device that is so much a part of SF, that to classify it as anything other than SF would be an injustice.

That plot device, of course, is time travel.

All three of the Christmas spirits take Scrooge on journeys through time and space. Christmas Past takes him on a journey from his childhood, up to a point a mere seven years previous. Christmas Present, although ostensibly the spirit of the here-and-now, in fact time jumps all over the next 23 hours. (If he were genuinely the ghost of Christmas Present, and only the present, he would merely have been able to show Scrooge what was going on at 1 in the morning, which was when he showed up.) Not only that, but he can see events a year down the line as he (correctly) predicts that Tiny Tim will not be alive to see another Christmas.

Christmas Yet-to-Come, obviously, takes him to the future–a future that includes the death of Tiny Tim and Scrooge’s own unmourned demise.

And if time travel isn’t enough to claim A Christmas Carol for the realm of SF, the latter two spirits don’t merely travel into just any future. Instead, they actually explore parallel universes–alternate time lines, if you will–because the Christmas day presented by the spirit to Scrooge is not the one that actually occurs. The Cratchits feast on a substantially larger bird than they had originally eaten, and Scrooge is present at his nephew’s Christmas gathering when, in the original time line, he had been absent.

And as for Christmas Yet-To-Come, we know–because Dickens tells us so–that Tiny Tim did not die. And, presumably, when Scrooge did eventually kick off, there were plenty of people who were choked up about it, rather than the London folk who previously greeted the news with sangfroid and chilly dispatch.

But now, of course, we have a problem.

Having made the assertion that A Christmas Carol is SF, we cannot stick with the assumption that the ghosts are merely ghosts. Because then we’re introducing elements of unexplained fantasy, and that doesn’t really work in the world of SF.

What we do have is the credo that any science, if sufficiently advanced, will seem like magic to people who don’t understand it (which is certainly the only hope in hëll that Star Trek: The Next Generation, with its replicators and holodecks, its transporters-with-no-receivers, and its faster-than-light drive that defies Einstein’s theories, could possibly have if it’s to be classified as SF).

If we say that the ghosts are just ghosts, then it’s mere fantasy.

But what if… what if…

There were no ghosts.

Not ghosts in the way that supernatural literature would describe.

What if, in fact, it were a sort of psychological thriller–but steeped in science fiction?

What if the ghosts did not come from an outside agency but were, in fact, created by Scrooge himself?

But how? How would that be possible?

Get ready. The Marvel zombies are going to love this.

Ebenezer Scrooge was a mutant.

Before you start screaming, stick with me on this one.

Scrooge’s main power was a combination of time travel. He also had the power of telepathic projection, projecting images of his own devising and also from history or literature.

The quickest way to attack this argument is to say, of course, “Well, hëll, if he had this power, why didn’t in manifest until he was old? And why, for the first time, on that particular Christmas eve?”

Ah, but it did manifest much earlier on. We can infer a couple of examples, and at least once–as I will now describe–we see it directly.

When he visits himself as a young man, alone in his boarding school, he suddenly spots “a man, in foreign garments: wonderfully real and distinct to look at” standing at the window. The man is identified as Ali Baba, and a host of other literary figures parade past.

Notice the utter lack of qualifiers. Dickens doesn’t say that Scrooge thought he saw them, or fancied he saw them. In fact, Dickens goes out of his way to note how real they are–as real, one would surmise, as the Spirits. Scrooge recognizes them as he would old friends. Obviously this image projection was routine in his youth, so routine that it didn’t strike him as out of the ordinary to see it.

His power increased as he got older. Marvel tradition has it that mutant powers don’t fully kick in until adolescence. That’s how it was in Scrooge’s case.

Here’s where we get into inferences, but Dickens was nothing if not a meticulous storyteller, and the way in which he does not explain certain aspects of the tale would seem to be red flags to the reader.

Before our eyes, the child Scrooge ages. His stature changes, but his environment does not. It would seem that he is destined to spend another Christmas in his miserable boarding school.

But wait! In runs, totally unannounced, his little sister. Her mission, she announces jubilantly, is to take young Scrooge home. She bubbles:

“Home, for ever and ever. Father is so much kinder than he used to be, that home’s like Heaven!… And you’re to be a man!… and are never to come back here…!”

Her comment about his becoming a man is a clear reference to the fact that he’s hit puberty. There is the clue that he’s now an adolescent, with his mutant power manifesting at full strength.

But what’s even more important is the timing of it all. Just when Scrooge’s power really kicks in, suddenly–with no explanation whatsoever–Scrooge’s father abruptly undergoes a change of heart.

Why?

What in the world could have motivated Papa Scrooge to do such a massive turnaround?

Dickens never says. No hint is given. He’s just “so much kinder,” and that’s that.

Then again, Dickens doesn’t have to spell it out, does he?

Someone undergoing a change of heart–just in time for the Christmas holidays?

It’s too obvious.

Scrooge “scrooged” his own father.

Obviously, Scrooge’s power is governed, to a large degree, by his subconscious. This would be consistent with Dickens’ description of a man who was not given over to flights of fancy (his parade of literary figures notwithstanding).

Subconsciously, Scrooge was sick of his dreary life. Subconsciously, Scrooge wanted to do something about it. And, subconsciously, Scrooge did.

We have no idea whether Papa Scrooge was visited by the same sorts of manifestations that Ebenezer eventually visited upon himself. It would seem logical. It’s clear that something happened to make Papa Scrooge see the light. And the immediate beneficiary was prodigal son Ebenezer, who came home for the holidays, never to be exiled again.

But as Scrooge grew older–as his attention turned toward money and greed–his heart hardened, and his power darkened. He became, you should pardon the expression, Dark Scrooge.

Another Christmas, and bang, someone else in Scrooge’s life “saw the light.” His beloved Belle dumped him at a time of year when most people are in a festive mood. What could have been the catalyst for such a decision? Could it have been “ghosts” which showed Belle an endless future lifetime of being shackled to the money-hungry miser? And could these visions have prompted Belle to decide that she could–that she was, in fact, well-advised to–seek a husband elsewhere?

Maaaaaybe.

But now, now we get to the latter years of Scrooge’s life. Although on the surface he is happy, his subconscious dwells on the fact that his life is, essentially, meaningless. He has no one. He loves no one. No one gives a dámņ about him–least of all, himself. The cocky certainty of “Dark Scrooge” gives way to his deep-down awareness of his own mortality.

Inwardly, he starts to realize that something has to change.

And his power starts to stir.

It’s seven years before the start of A Christmas Carol, and his subconscious realizes that Scrooge is going to have trouble changing, because his partner, Jacob Marley, is cut from the same cloth. Even if Scrooge did undergo a change of heart, Marley would probably tell him he’d lost his mind–maybe even convince him that it had all been a dream.

So he has to get Jacob Marley to change first. It’s consistent, after all; most of Scrooge’s life, his power has functioned to change the people around him rather than he himself.

It’s right around Christmas, the time of year when, for whatever mysterious reason, the mutant power of Ebenezer Scrooge is at its strongest.

Some manifestation of his power leaps out (probably while Scrooge is sleeping) and Jacob Marley suddenly finds himself face-to-face with some sort of bizarre apparition. Perhaps another deceased financier of their mutual acquaintance.

And it backfires–because Marley has a heart attack. He dies shortly thereafter–on Christmas Eve, in fact. I can just see it: “Jacob Marley, you will be visited by three ghosts…”

“Accck!” Thud.

“Or… maybe not.”

Yes, once again–far too many times for coincidence, by any rational stretch of the imagination–something major happens in Scrooge’s life right at Christmas. Dickens doesn’t say that Marley was visited by ghosts–but by this point, certainly, we can’t turn our thoughts away from the inevitable conclusions.

Deep, deep down where the aspects of Scrooge’s mind that control his power lay, Ebenezer is horrified and shocked that his power has brought about the death of his partner. The power hides away, safe and sound.

But Scrooge’s inward body clock ticks away and, year upon passing year, the concerns as to his own mortality become stronger and stronger.

And finally, finally, his subconscious can take it no longer. That part of him that manipulates his mutant power decides that enough is enough. Ebenezer Scrooge will be made to face directly, for the first time since he was a very young boy in that drafty, broken-down schoolhouse, the images and temporal powers that his mutant mind can bring forth.

It will happen–big shock here–on Christmas Eve.

And Scrooge will be the better man for it.

Just think, boys and girls: if Charles Dickens were writing now, instead of then, and whipping this story up for Marvel…

You just know what the title would be.

Yes, that’s right. Not A Christmas Carol, no. We’d have seen Patrick Stewart performing in…

The Uncanny X-Mas.

God save us, every one.

(Peter David, writer of stuff, will next theorize how Mary Poppins was actually a Time Lord, and her carpet bag was actually her TARDIS, which would explain how it was able to transport her (the umbrella was just a prop) and how she could fit so much stuff into it, and… eh, maybe not.)


21 comments on “What the Dickens?

  1. … Y’know, I could totally see Mary Poppins as a Time Lord. I always thought there was something fishy about those cartoon penguins… being evil aliens would certainly explain it! The umbrella is, however, obviously of the sonic variety, and not a mere prop.
    .
    I always wanted to see Stewart’s version of “A Christmas Carol” – it was on TV once that I knew of in time to tape, but I accidentally taped over it before watching.
    .
    Now I hafta re-read A Christmas Carol. It’s been years (prolly closer to decades) and now I have a whole new light in which to look at it. GREAT column, PAD!

    1. Actually, It might be kinda cool if the Doctor visited Scrooge multiple times between regenerations. We know that The Doctor likes to see some events more than once. Eccelson could have impersonated The Ghost of Christmas Past, Tenant impersonated The Ghost of Christmas Present, and Matt Smith impersonated The Ghost of Christmas Yet-to-Come, etc.
      .

      1. I see the Ghost of Christmas Present more as a Tom Baker type. Could be Patrick Troughton, I suppose, but I haven’t seen enough of him to really have an opinion there.

  2. I haven’t seen the Stewart version, either. I’m sure he did an excellent job.
    .
    But my absolute favourite Scrooge is (and has been since the first it ran) is George C Scott.

    1. Stewart was transcendent in his stage version, but if you’re talking film, I absolutely agree with you. Scott was brilliant. The whole cast was. Edward Woodward as the Ghost of Christmas Present was easily the most intimidating incarnation of that Ghost I’ve ever seen. It’s like Marley’s ghost decided they needed to send the Equalizer after Scrooge.
      .
      PAD

      1. Transcendent, indeed. I had the good fortune to see Stewart’s show on Broadway ages ago. And although I *KNOW* the stage was bare save for Stewart, his stool and a podium (oh, and the book, of course) I swear you could see all the characters wonderfully real and distinct to look at on stage.
        .
        Perhaps Stewart has a bit of Scrooge’s power…

  3. It strikes me that Cratchit not being named until halfway through the book is most appropriate. That is, after all, the part of the story where Scrooge’s walls are beginning to break down, and he’s starting to relate to people as people again, instead of just their functions (or lack thereof) in his professional life.

  4. Yes, that’s right: A Christmas Carol by master science fiction writer Charles Dickens.
    .
    Mark Gatiss must’ve read this column before going off to write the “The Unquiet Dead” for new Doctor Who.

  5. “Not Star Trek: The Next Generation, of course. No, most episodes are little more than wastes of Stewart’s time and talent.”

    Wait, what?

  6. Speaking of Star Trek and Doctor Who…

    This weekend PBS is broadcasting last year’s production of “Hamlet” starring David Tennant and Patrick Stewart. Check your local listings!

  7. That last sentence certainly was prophetic. Although, to be fair, I can’t think of any actor who could have played Charles Xavier as well as Patrick Stewart (except, perhaps, Ben Kingsley).

  8. The only thing about it is, given we have the perfection that is the Alastair Sim version, couldn’t Stewart’s formidable talent be put to better use on something original instead of a remake?

    1. Stewart’s “Christmas Carol” wasn’t a remake. He stood on stage and for two hours, from memory, performed the entire story and played every part. To dismiss it as a remake simply because another actor essayed a single role in the work decades ago is to do Stewart’s accomplishment a huge disservice.
      .
      PAD

      1. I have huge respect for Mr Stewart and his work. Loved him as Ahab, for example. But the point remains that there are thousands of novels and short stories out there begging to be adapted to the big screen (or stage) but aren’t because the schedule is cluttered with remakes/re-imagining/re-interpretings of the same stories. Just recently, the AICN site’s main page had no less than FOUR remakes being advertised on the same day. So, while he pulled off quite a tour de force, couldn’t it have been done with a story that hadn’t been done before?

  9. I just realised that nobody has brought up the fact that you just did a She-Hulk Christmas Carol story.

  10. That was seventeen years ago. Ðámņ, we’re getting on in years.

    One of the things I remember about that Christmas Eve show was that right after the show let out at 11 PM, I got the car out of the garage and drove to Port Jefferson and made it there in time to hear the bells of midnight mass at Infant Jesus. Now that was a Christmas miracle.

  11. The subject, Mr. Scrooge (whose name I believe was a deliberate stab at the frugal Dutch) was depicted as an elderly man, possibly undernourished. Gruel was a standard food item back then but if he had so much wealth he probably wouldn’t spring for a full-time housekeeper, which was the standard of the day. So no doubt he did his own cooking and at the end of his workday he came home and did the 19th century equivalent of warming up some leftovers, as no cooking process was mentioned in the play. If that food sat around all day before being re-heated there is a possibility that the ingredients spoiled or something in the original composition was of questionable quality. Maybe he just used bad water.

    I think Scrooge was having a food-poisoning event on Christmas Eve, possibly even a heart-related emergency. If his metabolism had been dragged down badly enough by his diet, Scrooge’s visitations, clear memories of events long passed plus an estimation of future happenings point to hallucination, and possibly a Near-Death Experience, or NDE. Fortunately, he was robust enough to recover from the episode and as a side-benefit experience a change of heart as well.

Comments are closed.