Joseph Pearce on the Spirit of Christmas and "A Christmas Carol"

"It could be argued and has been argued that, after Shakespeare, Charles Dickens is the finest writer in the English language. His works have forged their way into the canon to such a degree that it is much more difficult to know which of his novels to leave off the recommended reading list than it is to choose which to include. Each of us has our favourites and each invariably begs to differ with his neighbour's choice. True, in terms of pure brute statistics, we would be forced to concede that A Tale of Two Cities is most people's favourite because it is usually listed as the bestselling novel of all time, with sales exceeding 200 million (though Don Quixote, which is excluded from official statistics and has never been out of print since its first publication four hundred years ago, has probably sold more copies).

"Those who are justifiably skeptical of the claim that the bestselling is necessarily the best, might point to a poll conducted by the Folio Society, a de facto private members club for bibliophiles, as a more objective way of judging the best of Dickens as opposed to the most popular. More than ten thousand members of the Society voted in 1998 for their favourite books from any age. . . . In any case, and irrespective of these populist and elitist judgments, none of these Dickensian heavyweights wins my vote as Dickens' greatest work. That accolade belongs, me judice, to the diminutive genius of A Christmas Carol.

"Originally published in 1843, A Christmas Carol is sandwiched chronologically between Barnaby Rudge and Martin Chuzzlewit, much weightier tomes. Yet Dickens' ghost story not only punches beyond its weight but outpunches its heavyweight rivals. Switching metaphors, the character of Ebenezer Scrooge, like a genie released or unleashed from a bottle, escapes from the pages of the book to charm the collective psyche of the culture. He is a literary colossus who, without the benefit of eponymous billing, has emerged from Dickens' imaginary menagerie as a cautionary icon of mean-spirited worldliness. Serving as a 'mirror of scorn and pity towards Man,' which Tolkien considered one of the chief characteristics of all good fairy-stories, Scrooge has shone across the generations as a beacon of hope and redemption, as powerful parabolically as the Prodigal Son of which he is a type."

In a recent commentary, Joseph Pearce, Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative, reflected on the Spirit of Christmas as exemplified by A Christmas Carol.

To access Mr. Pearce's complete essay, please visit:

The Imaginative Conservative: Holy Ghosts & the Spirit of Christmas: "A Christmas Carol"