A few days ago, I got Scrooged. Also, I got Cratchit-ed. Sounds uncomfortable, doesn’t it?
I can assure you that it was not. On a recent Saturday, I spent nearly three hours online with about a dozen lovely people from all over North America (from British Columbia to Long Island, New York, and many places in between) participating in a communal reading of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.”
Although originally written as a novella, the story has been famously turned into many a movie, television show and theatrical production over the past 182 years. The text we used for the reading was edited and formatted as a play in a new edition recently published by the Jesuit Media Lab (JML), which also hosted the reading.
Playwright, journalist and JML fellow Renee Rodin abridged the novella’s text based on Dickens’ own personal prompt copy of the book that he used for public readings throughout his life. That gave our performance a nice historic touch, too. In fact, if you want to see a digital version of Dickens’ handwritten annotated copy, it’s available to see on the New York Public Library’s digital collections website.
Like most people, of course, I already knew the story. I’ve seen the movies and at least two staged versions. I think I read the novella a long, long time ago, but that could be a figment (spirit?) of my imagination. What I discovered in the course of our reading — during which I played Bob Cratchit, Ebenezer Scrooge and a number of other minor characters — was a new resonance with what’s going on in the world today.
After introductions and a short prayer of self-reflection, we began with a word from the author himself, reminding us that this was no ordinary Christmas story:
I have in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it. Their faithful Friend and Servant, Charles Dickens, December 1843.
And then our first reader intoned that famous opening line: “Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.” And we were off.
I sat spellbound in front of my computer for the next three hours, listening to the voices of regular people like me (although some were very good and polished actors, indeed) reading unrehearsed and unprepared this ageless “ghostly little book.” For it is certainly that. There are, after all, no visits from Santa and no lessons to be learned from recalling the story of the Incarnation and Nativity in Bethlehem. This was a story for the Victorian age of industrialization, urban growth, strict social codes, and wide gaps between the haves and the have-nots. So, yes, it seemed to me a perfectly suitable story to consider in 2025.
The story is, “at its heart, an extended social critique,” writes JML fellow Michael O’Connell in his introductory essay to the new edition. “Dickens wrote the book not as a call to ‘keep Christ in Christmas’ but because he’d read a government report on the horrific conditions of child laborers and wanted to do something about it.”
This story, along with other Dickens’ works like “Oliver Twist,” “did a great deal to raise awareness for the suffering of the poor, and helped shape public sentiment in ways that did indeed lead to significant societal changes,” writes O’Connell.
Aside from the biblical Nativity narrative itself, “A Christmas Carol” is perhaps the most beloved and oft-told Christmas story of all time. That might sound surprising, given that Dickens wasn’t really interested in religious belief. For example, O’Connell writes, “We don’t get a sense for what Scrooge thinks about God, or how these beliefs might shape his actions.”
And yet, for people of faith, the leap from the story of the Incarnation to a serious belief in caring for the poor and less fortunate is not a giant one, and Dickens’ tale fits hand-in-glove with the social justice requirements of our faith that Jesus outlines for us in Matthew 25: “For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me.”
The story, at its heart, is a story of conversion. It’s about the fear of how we will be remembered after we die and also about being so scared and wounded that we’re willing to change our ways. It’s an Advent story with a powerful Lenten theme of awareness and repentance.
The story, at its heart, is a story of conversion.
“It is the story of one man who is blind to both his own flaws and to the problems of the world around him, who gets broken open and who becomes a different sort of man — one who acts,” O’Connell writes.
All these years later, the story continues to speak to us, and reading it together and out loud amplified some core messages for me: We are meant for each other. We have responsibility not only to those we love but to those around us. We are called to keep our eyes wide open to the injustices in the world and to not turn away because we’d rather pretend they don’t exist.
Even though the word “Scrooge” has become synonymous with words like greedy and miserly, I was reminded while listening that there’s more to it than that. To be Ebenezer Scrooge is to be greedy, for sure, but it’s also about muddling through life with blinders on, wondering not “Why are there poor?” but, instead: “Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?” To be Scrooge is to see the poor as easily disposed of “surplus population.” Sound familiar?
And, yet, to be Scrooge is also to be a person open to transformation, even if it requires the horrors of ghostly apparitions to bring about that change. The point of the story is that there is hope for Scrooge, as there is for the rest of us. For we get to ask the same question he asks as we ponder our own lives and the changes we need to make:
“Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they the shadows of things that May be, only?”
Do we have a chance to change? The answer, Dickens reminds us, is yes. Still staring at his name on his own gravestone, Scrooge changes before our very eyes.
“I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year,” he says near the play’s end. “I will live in the Past, the Present and the Future. The Spirits of all three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons they teach. Oh, tell me I may sponge away the writing on this stone!”
And we see at that moment what is possible for us. This Victorian-era story never gets old — it seems — it just finds new meaning and purpose. That in itself is a good lesson for all of us.
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Note: The version of the play created by Jesuit Media Lab is available for purchase for only $5 so you can host your own communal reading. For more information about the publication, and for tips on how to host your own Christmas Carol reading party, click here.