For many, A Christmas Carol is the ultimate festive story. I taught it for twenty-five consecutive years and never tired of it. Its themes are timeless. It has all the ingredients of a satisfying Christmas yarn: festive hauntings, family warmth, a Grinch-like antagonist and moral redemption.
And its entertainment value meant that readers didn’t even notice its wagging finger. This 1843 publication helped humanise the poor and sent a stark message to the middle and upper classes: social justice begins with personal transformation.
But if this Christmassy novella helped popularise the warm and fuzzy aspects the season, some of Dickens’s later works are far more cynical in tone. This is markedly true of Great Expectations (1861), which acts as an antidote to the ‘fairy tale’ finale of A Christmas Carol and exposes the grim reality of the poor at a time of year that contemporary readers increasingly associated with generosity and abundance. In Cherwell, the University of Oxford’s independent student newspaper, it is noted that Dickens wrote a letter to a friend, saying that he felt as if he had ‘murdered Christmas’.
Different times
It is worth noting that, while published in 1861, Great Expectations begins in pre-Victorian 1812, the year in which Dickens was born. This is significant. By time of publication, the ruling classes were becoming somewhat more aware of social injustices. Poverty was no longer universally perceived as a consequence of fecklessness; writers such as Dickens were raising awareness of issues such as unemployment and lack of education being key drivers of destitution. Nevertheless, paucity of understanding was still rife.
In Great Expectations, Dickens takes readers back to an unmitigatingly bleak not-so-distant past, lest anyone forget. Dickens remembered it well, for it was his own past. He would surely not have forgotten his father being slent to Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison, or being pulled out of school to work as a ‘labouring hind’ in Warren’s Blacking Factory at the age of twelve. Dickens learned at an early age that poverty was perceived as a crime.
An ominous landscape
In the opening chapter of Great Expectations, its young protagonist, Pip, is making his way to the churchyard on the Kent marshes to visit the graves of his parents. The Christmas Eve setting is far from full of festive cheer: it is a ‘raw’ afternoon and ‘evening’ is approaching. This may well symbolise the cold and dark world of orphans such as Pip, who lived with his harridan of a sister, Mrs Joe, who brought him up ‘by hand’. Pip was one of the lucky ones.
The little stone lozenges
Alongside the graves of his parents, Pip also notes ‘five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long’. He then goes on to name each of his five small deceased brothers, imagining them having been buried with their hands in their pockets, having given up on the ‘universal struggle’ that is life.
Such vivid description turns the young brothers flesh-and-blood beings with personalities, making it impossible to dismiss them as mere statistics. Yet statistics they were. Again, the reader is reminded that Pip, as a survivor, is one of the ‘lucky’ ones.
In 1800, around one in three children died before their fifth birthday, compared to four deaths per thousand births by 2020. While all social classes were affected by rampant disease, poor sanitation and lack of medical knowledge, the poorest in society suffered the greatest losses. Considering the prevalence of child labour and overcrowding, this is unsurprising. What is surprising, however, is that poverty and overcrowding still affect mortality rates today.
Criminal justice
The novel’s sinister setting is intensified by the appearance of ‘a fearful man, all in coarse grey’ with ‘a great iron on his leg’. Adult readers would no doubt recognise this character as a convict, an escapee from the nearby ‘hulks’ that housed prisoners before their transportion to Australia. From a child’s perspective, this man is a source of terror, a monster who demands that Pip bring him ‘wittles’ (food) and a ‘file’. The surrounding mist (mentioned more than thirty times in the novel) enhances the dark tone, while mimicking both Pip’s confusion and the inability of the powerful to see the realities of the time.
At this point the terrifying convict is nameless. This enhances the mystery of the novel, but could also signify the dismissive attitude of the ruling classes towards those who commit crimes as a means of survival.
Education and crime
Many years later, Pip learns that the escaped prisoner, his secret benefactor, is named Abel Magwitch. Magwitch tells Pip of his own childhood as an uneducated ‘ragged little creetur’, destined for a life of ‘[t]ramping, begging, thieving, working sometimes’. When apprehended, he would be given ‘tracts [he] couldn’t read’ and ‘speeches [he] couldn’t understand’.
Conversely, another convict, Compeyson, was ‘a dab hand at the ways of the gentlefolks’, his education enabling him to dodge the harsher punishments meted out to Magwitch. Dickens is quite clearly drawing a link between education and social justice, reinforcing his belief in free education for the poor.
Moral ambiguity
From the outset, the moral ambiguity in the novel is striking. Pip responds to Magwitch with both fear and compassion. In stealing food to give the escaped prisoner, Pip is simultaneously generous and criminal. His kindness is inseparable from his self-interest; he risks punishment, and his generosity is intertwined with wrongdoing.
This moral ambiguity highlights something about Christmas: charity and kindness are not always neat or heroic. Unlike the supernatural lessons of A Christmas Carol, where moral action is rewarded instantly, Pip’s Christmas virtue is entangled with fear, crime and survival.
An honest Christmas story
Far from ‘murdering’ Christmas in Great Expectations, Dickens gives us an honest portrait of generosity as something messy and imperfect. Personal change such as Scrooge’s matters, but so does systemic reform. With poverty and social injustice still too common, perhaps returning to this darker story in the coming year will prove worthwhile – and even necessary.
