I have a complicated relationship with Charles Dickens. He is the epitome of the Author. He was hugely prolific, massively popular, and has had a profound cultural impact on how Britain sees itself.

How is it possible, then, to dismiss and downplay such a figure when novels and national identity are very much one’s thing? When industry, history, material conditions and class relations are the prism through which all books you read are refracted?

Quite easily, as it turns out. Dickens is a particularly springy springboard; I will say that for him.

My relationship with Dickens began at school when we had to read A Tale of Two Cities for Higher English. I have fond memories of this. Overall, the novel is sympathetic to the suffering of the French peasantry and condemnatory of the aristocracy but it crudely demonises anyone actively political and is desperately shallow in its caricatures. The main thing though was that after I finished it I scoured the Wikipedia page and came to the cultural impact/film adaptations section. There I discovered that Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises is loosely based on the novel. Following this discovery, I was generously indulged and got to show the film in class on the condition that I give a presentation on the references and parallels.

This tumultuous encounter had its second act when Hard Times was set as a typical example of Victorian literature and the so-called Condition of England novel in the second year of my English Literature degree. On the surface this book is about industrialisation, class and material conditions when Britain was at its peak as the workshop of the world. So far, so good.

Marx was a contemporary of Dickens and an admirer of his work. I therefore expected Hard Times to be a record of exploitation and shed light on social relations in the factory towns of the mid-19th century, if not in a revolutionary way then at least accurately and honestly. My disappointment was great indeed. Hard Times essentially rejects materialism and condemns trade unionism. Its bases for doing this are that 1) quantification can only exist at the expense of qualitative values and 2) unions’ powers of coercion are mean in that they create an unlevel playing field. This is totally false as material conditions that can be counted are in dialectical relationship with qualitative outcomes. Furthermore, Dickens misunderstands trade unionism entirely – it’s not about giving workers the same level of input into decisions as the employer or necessarily even collaboration. Trade unionism is about coercion, forcing employers to take notice even if they do not wish to; in other words, if mobilised they ought to have greater power than employers and workers as individuals – that’s the whole point.

This brings me to the third act in my personal psychodrama with Charles Dickens – A Christmas Carol. Now, in between I have engaged with Dickens through the musical, Oliver and I watched the recent adaptation of David Copperfield (which I thought was brilliant, by the way), but my next prose encounter was with this notorious yuletide novella. The occasion was, of course, my Mitchell Library Classic Book Group now meeting on the first Thursday of every month at 6pm. I’d never read it before then and I’ve not seen the Muppets version. Although, one cannot get away from its permeation of Christmas culture in the UK and around the world.

Again, this should have been a text that I could get on with. It is centrally concerned with social justice and how to be a good person in a cruel world. By and large, I do get along with it. Reading it you get a sense that this is the archetypal expression of the secular myth of Christmas. Its “true meaning of Christmas” really has little to do with Christianity explicitly and that aligns with most people’s contemporary understanding. That being said, it is also historically situated and its social relations are of their time with their stark class divisions and references to workhouses and debtors’ prisons. Dickens vividly evokes a version of Victorian urban life with lavish descriptions and a superabundance of material culture in his ever-accumulating lists.

Ultimately, Scrooge’s motivation for his change of heart and altered treatment of his peers is how he will be remembered when he dies (after being shown reactions to his death by the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come). This humanist message is perhaps more grounded than the promise/threat of heavenly reward/infernal punishment. I do think, however, that it fails to address consequentialist reasons for being nice or generous to people at Christmas, and indeed at any other time of the year. Scrooge’s transformation is on the whole a subjective one in the sense that it is self-pity and reputational concern that primarily precipitate the character switch. His nostalgia for his old employer’s generosity and the FOMO-inducing revelations of the Ghost of Christmas Present equally spur him on. The pathetic scene of Tiny Tim’s preventable demise creates a well of emotion in him. Scrooge is a Man of Feeling who ends the tale practising what I would describe as affective altruism.

I think the emotional approach to ethical action comes across in Scrooge’s language. He is someone who instinctively and almost involuntarily reacts to the world around him. His dialogue abounds with interjections (and I’m sure if the author were not born in such a generally PG era, expletives). His most famous catchphrase is “Bah humbug!” (though the words never appear consecutively). This visceral id response informs his moral acts, not any thought-out philosophy.

Scrooge is an affective altruist, not an effective altruist. There is no greatest good-to-action ratio calculation going on here. His is purely a vibes-based approach. In other words, he’s a sentimentalist not a dispassionate sum total of virtue increaser.

I think that the message of A Christmas Carol is really, to be a better employer and be a better patriarch (I don’t mean this necessarily pejoratively). Give your staff time off, put on a staff party occasionally and be generous to family and friends i.e. people with whom you already have a social relationship that (certainly in Dickens’s view) ought to be more than transactional. Nevertheless, the categories of employer, benefactor and patriarch go unchallenged. And what of one’s moral obligation to people with whom we will never interact? There exists a limit to our capacity for tele-empathy, which Adam Smith articulated 90 years before Dickens in his Theory of Moral Sentiments.

Feeling is a gateway drug to moral action and to that end, it cannot be underestimated, but pity-triggered moral action may also evolve[1] into hard[2] calculus of consequentialism[3] (i.e. affective altruism → effective altruism) which Dickens so eschewed.

[1] I mean this in the sense of synthesis, not progress per se.

[2] But not necessarily hard-hearted.

[3] What we may wish to “consequent” is beyond the scope of this blog post.