Thread by @GCSE_Macbeth

I watched a lecture on A Christmas Carol from the academic John Mullan. I'll pull out some highlights.

I am paraphrasing some of this, so do check out the original lecture if you're interested:



1/

Mullan notes that the Victorian ghost story, which we now think of as a quintessential 19th c literary form, had not really got start when ACC was published in 1843. ACC precedes that craze (and Dickens himself would not be shy of capitalising on it once it got started).

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Christmas was a commercially important time for booksellers and authors then as now, and Dickens in his correspondance often refers to the importance of having work finished "in time for Christmas".

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Mullan: "The commercial motive is always entangled for Dickens with the festive one, the celebration of the season for which ACC is famous."

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Mullan foregrounds the idea of Christmas Carol as a performance piece, which Dickens himself performed on stage, and which is written for this purpose.

It began in its composition -- Dickens would "act out" characters in front of a mirror when writing.

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Did Dickens believe in ghosts?

Mullan: He didn't "officially" believe in ghosts. When the explosion of spiritualism and mediumship happened in the 1860s Dickens campaigned aggressively AGAINST it.

BUT...

6/

In Mullan's words, Dickens believed in the "psychological reality" of ghosts.

He believed people experienced hauntings and in the very real terror of these. But Dickens believed there were "explanations" for them --

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although his "explanations" would seem nonsensical to us today: the influence of foul odours and miasmatic air, for instance.

Dickens believed in mesmerism and was an amateur hypnotist.

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Mullan then says some interesting things about Dickens' writing.

He refers to the "wonderful colloquial vulgarity" of Dickens' style. He means this as a sincere compliment. Dickens prioritised narrative voice, and performance, and overturns some ideas about "good" writing.

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The first example Mullan gives is the phrase "I know, of my own knowledge" in the first page. Your Austens or Jameses or Brontes would never write "I know, of my own knowledge".

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Mullan also spends time on Dickens' humorous use of cliche, giving the example of "dead as a doornail".

And most interestingly...

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He looks at Dickens' use of "as if".

Mullan: this is called simile but it isn't simile. It's a "flight of fancy".

Mullan: people read Dickens as a social realist but he's not, he's a fantasist.

"As if" signifies the way he transformed reality "into something super-real."

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Example:

"The ancient tower of a church [...] struck the hours and quarters in the clouds, with tremulous vibrations afterwards, AS IF its teeth were chattering in its frozen head up there."

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Mullan: "It's as if the very style of ACC is dancing round Scrooge, correcting him, enacting in itself all the capacities -- not just of generosity, but of fancifulness -- that he does not have."

To unpick this for a second:

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I think he means: Scrooge's cold and solitary character isn't just contrasted with the Cratchits' love or the GOCPres' banquet, but with the prose itself and the atmosphere of Christmas and the infamous "Dickensian" London. "Dickensian" a marker of fantasy not just squalor.

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The final part of the lecture focusses on contemporary reaction to Dickens. He was hugely successful, of course, but his work met with reservations and snobbery amongst contemporary critics.

One imagines his own relentless, transparent pursuit of success didn't help this.

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Anyway, do check out the full lecture, and I hope there were one or two things here you can share with your students!

God bless us, every one.

/end