Historical Investigation: A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (1843)
"This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate"
What place does A Christmas Carol have in the history of the urban fantasy genre?
A lot, it turns out.
Do I need to recount the story of A Christmas Carol, one of the most well-known stories in the Western canon? Ebenezer Scrooge, an aging, misery businessman is visited by the tortured ghost of his dead partner who warns him that he’s heading down a bad path. If he doesn’t learn kindness and fellow-feeling, he will be lashed down in hell (or perhaps a form of purgatory), his spirit burdened by the weight of his covetousness and greed.
Scrooge is visited by three spirts of Christmases Past, Present, and Future who show him how he came to be this way, what he is missing out on, and how glad the world will be once it is rid of him if he doesn't change. The visitations work, he feels the spirit of Christmas (a particularly Victorian, secular Christmas), and becomes like a second father to Tiny Tim1. Who’s Tiny Tim? Come on, you know.
On the first page, Dickens (in his strong narrative voice) insists that Jacob Marley is dead, and we must understand that “or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.” Already in our second historical investigation we are seeing a key urban fantasy tenet taking hold: establishing the story in the real world. Put a big pin in this one because we will be returning to it again and again in our on-going investigations. Establishing verisimilitude is one of a handful of the must-dos in any urban fantasy, and we find the earliest uses of this trope in Dickens’s ghost stories.
In fact, if you’ll allow me a tangent, he also deployed this technique in the little known proto-Christmas Carol short story, “The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton" (1836). Yes, if you’re not familiar with this story, Dickens essentially workshopped A Christmas Carol seven years earlier in this story. This time instead of the miserly Scrooge, we have the pretty vile gravedigger who is introduced rapping a child over the head with a lantern for being too loud celebrating Christmas Eve. This time around, it’s a group of goblins who provide the magical intervention and the entire story is much meaner and crueler.
Our interest, though, is in the first line:
“In an old abbey town, down in this part of the country, a long, long while ago—so long, that the story must be a true one, because our great-grandfathers implicitly believed it—there officiated as sexton and grave-digger in the churchyard, one Gabriel Grub.” (emphasis mine)
Now, in this opening Dickens is going even more for playful and knowing irony than in his opener for A Christmas Carol. But in both cases, he sets the stage as a real place, one even you (dear reader) may be familiar with. Interestingly, in “Sexton” he uses the technique of telling, essentially, a tall tale set in the indeterminate past (not unlike Otranto). With A Christmas Carol, he had fully embraced the idea of setting the story in the here and now.
I mentioned that “Sexton” is meaner and crueler than A Christmas Carol. The sexton’s story ends with him disappearing for a decade after the goblins show him how vile he has been (while mercilessly kicking him) only to show back up in town a ragged but “contented” old man. He has no chance to correct his ways, no chance at internal transformation. If A Christmas Carol is something beyond a heartwarming Christmas story it is this: a secular story about transformation.
After the three visitations, Scrooge musters to make merry and notices his door knocker, which had briefly become Jacob Marley’s head in the opening chapter. Scrooge mutters to himself, “I scarcely ever looked at it before.” The encounters with the ghosts of Christmases Past, Present, and Future have led to a profound transformation within Scrooge. He now sees the world with different eyes, noticing things that he had never bothered to consider before. The most classic screen adaptation of this type of transformation is, of course, Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life.
While this transformation is deployed in service of the kind message of A Christmas Carol, the trope of an internal transformation after an encounter with the strange will be put to frequent (and dark) uses in later Weird fiction.
A Christmas Carol is also a “Christmas book,” a genre defined by Dickens and pretty intertwined with the development of what we would come to know as urban fantasy. John Clute and John Grant, in their seminal The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, assert that “The few CBs [Christmas books] of lasting importance are fantasy or supernatural fiction,” and that “A Christmas Carol [is] the most important of all.”2
There is an interesting narrative dynamic in A Christmas Carol where the narrator is speaking directly to the reader (and presumably is omniscient) while Scrooge is speaking to himself. The narrator does not come right out and say, “all of this is real,” but he might as well given how strongly it is implied.
You might have thought we were done with A Christmas Carol, but there’s even more. We’ve already made the point that A Christmas Carol is important in the urban fantasy genre because it so thoroughly sets its fantastical action in a real world, here and now that its readers would be intimately familiar with. Dickens’ larger body of work also had a large influence on the development of the genre.
Clute and Grant point out, “[Dickens] transmogrified London into a profoundly evocative stage” that “evolved into full-blown urban fantasy.” Clute and Grant use the more narrow definition of urban fantasy, something like “a fantasy where the city is a central character,” but the insight is still relevant. Dickens played a central role in both the development of modern fantasies and urban fantasies, and we can glimpse that development throughout A Christmas Carol.3
As Farah Mendlesohn and Edward James mention in A Short History of Fantasy, the Enlightenment had a particularly heavy influence on the development of fantasy as a genre. Before the scientific rationalism of the era, the supernatural was seen to exist more or less simultaneously with our everyday lives. But in the eighteenth century, “[the] world became something one could both understand and control.”4 Authors in the Enlightenment began deploying the supernatural as literary devices to create heightened experiences in their texts as they were increasing seen as not of this world. And A Christmas Carol marks one turning point after which more of these stories would be told in present day (and not in the past as with Otranto).
It’s important in our investigations to reckon seriously with bigotry and bias, and in A Christmas Carol that means acknowledging Scrooge as an antisemitic caricature. Regardless if Dickens intended Scrooge to be Jewish, the character does display a number of antisemitic tropes (pointed nose, obsessed with money, hates/ruins Christmas) that when stacked together lead some to conclude that Scrooge is antisemitic.5 Others disagree.
The point of this note is not to dissect Scrooge or Dickens motivations, it’s simply to note that Scrooge has antisemitic characteristics which perpetuate harmful stereotypes about Jewish people. This doesn’t stop us from discussing A Christmas Carol as a fundamentally secular and humanist story and it does not mean that the story is bad or should not be read. It’s merely something to track.
A Christmas Carol was not on my original list of stories to read for this project, but several TikTok commenters brought it up and it also is featured prominently in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy and A Short History of Fantasy (two excellent, but aging resources). It’s a short read and slotted nicely into the first half of the 19th century so I decided to add it and keep an open mind.
I’m glad that I did, because Dickens really did kick off or popularize many of the tropes and conventions that would be distilled by later authors into genre conventions of urban fantasy. The commitment to the real world. The city as a character. A “mundane” main character who encounters the otherworldly and leaves the experience changed. Ghosts.
The family lineage is clear to see, and much stronger than I expected walking into this particular investigation. But I would also be lying if I said the only reason I read A Christmas Carol is because of its potential importance to urban fantasy. I also just like Charles Dickens writing. He’s not for everyone, but he scratches an itch for me. For example, after describing Marley is being “dead as a door-nail”, Dickens narrator says:
Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade.
You may find that cringey, perhaps worthy of a “bah, humbug.” But for me, it’s as delightful as a Christmas goose.
Lastly, if you enjoyed this article, you may also enjoy the accompanying TikTok:
Who did not die.
pg. 192, John Clute and John Grant, The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997)
pp. 268-9, Clute and Grant (1997)
pg. 14 Farah Mendlesohn and Edward James, A Short History of Fantasy (2012)
Credit to Simkern and this video of theirs for this analysis and description of antisemitic tropes and the concepts of them becoming more problematic as they are “stacked.”