We were there to see the Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s annual rendition of A Christmas Carol, as we would do nearly every year into the future. The Pabst is a stunning venue, the kind of place that makes you think your town is special, though as I got older, I realized just about every American city has its own version of the Pabst: a local magnate’s eponymous temple to the arts, built with spoils from the Industrial Revolution. 

This makes it the perfect home for Charles Dickens. In the mid-19th century, as A Christmas Carol debuted, Milwaukee was a grand city in the style of Chicago, infused with German culture and European elegance. The city’s prosperity, however, often did not extend to the laborers who produced the wealth. Humbug! 

Captain Frederick Pabst immigrated from small-town Germany in 1848, marrying into the Best family and eventually growing their brewing operation into the largest in the United States. By his death in 1904, he had “left his mark on the city of Milwaukee, investing in real estate projects like the Whitefish Bay Pleasure Resort and the Pabst Theater and making financial contributions to welfare, education, and arts organizations,” according to the Wisconsin Historical Society.

Indeed, when the opera house that became the Pabst Theater burned down in 1895, the captain is said to have cabled, “Rebuild at Once!” Each Christmas, Pabst and his wife supplied 100 families with baskets of groceries to get through the harsh Wisconsin winter. Ebenezer Scrooge, he was not. 

Christmastime makes the world of Dickens bearable, cozy even. And for me, a Christian, Christmas is not a holiday about trees and eggnog and piles of gifts and overspending, but about Christ, who makes our world possible — and bearable and cozy, too, if we can see his light.

Dickens was a complicated Christian: he was born in the Church of England, but later turned away, toward Unitarianism. He focused on the social good produced by Christian principles, but was a vehement critic of the church hierarchy, as well as of clerical hypocrisy and abuses. The light of true faith shines in his profound commitment to charity and the social good. 

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Metaphors of light and dark abound in his work, serving as a commentary on wealth and poverty, patronage and exploitation, individualism and community, and damnation and salvation. In A Christmas Carol, he contrasts Scrooge’s “gloomy suite of rooms” and his “neglected grave” with scenes of how the miser’s former employer, Fezziwig, ran his business. Fezziwig’s warehouse was “snug, and warm, and dry.” Scrooge’s nephew Fred, another of the book’s positive role models, throws a party in a “bright, dry, gleaming room.” (Light and dark are clearly delineated in Dickens — a deeply Christian concept; no moral relativism here.) Dickens describes many wonderful things as “bright” in the book, making obvious the motif of light and dark. His characteristically precise illustrations of both worlds have a jarring effect on readers, fostering the visceral appreciation for warmth that occurs when you step in from the cold.

One passage, as Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Present approach Bob Cratchit’s residence, is perfectly Dickensian. “The sky was gloomy,” the author wrote, “and the shortest streets were choked up with a dingy mist, half thawed, half frozen, whose heavier particles descended in a shower of sooty atoms, as if all the chimneys in Great Britain had, by one consent, caught fire, and were blazing away to their dear hearts’ content. There was nothing very cheerful in the climate or the town, and yet was there an air of cheerfulness abroad that the clearest summer air and brightest summer sun might have endeavored to diffuse in vain.”

Scrooge finds that, inexplicably, “the people who were shoveling away on the housetops were jovial and full of glee; calling out to one another from the parapets, and now and then exchanging a facetious snowball — better-natured missile far than many a wordy jest — laughing heartily if it went right and not less heartily if it went wrong.” 

This is the source of a light so bright that even the summer sun could not compete with it. And it is the reason that Christmas Carol is Dickens’ best work — in a macro sense, his stories are really all Christmas carols. Christ is the flame that lights the West, bringing comfort to the poor and a burden to the rich. Blessed are the meek.

Scrooge, who represents darkness and the other side of the equation, has replaced this light with a “golden” idol. We see this clearly in the scene where he is forced by the Ghost of Christmas Past to watch his former self part ways with a girl to whom he was once betrothed, and she reproaches him for having chosen this idol instead of their love.

The younger Scrooge replies, “There is nothing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!”

“Gently” the girl answers, “You fear the world too much.… All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach. I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one by one, until the master-passion, Gain, engrosses you. Have I not?”

Critics might say that this detachment from the woes of the world — which are a realistic source of fear — excuses predatory capitalism. Believers who focus on the next life might be tempted to ignore the ills of this one. However, Christian apologists argue that it is precisely this kind of fear of the world that causes predation. And the fear can only be overcome by faith in Christ. The Ubermensch — the godless man who makes himself the measure of value — takes no prisoners on his way to evading material poverty, just as Scrooge stiffs Crachit. Dickens demonstrated that the great miser’s fear leads to a combination of material wealth and spiritual poverty.

Dickens’s Christian ghost stories and Victorian spiritualism were a counterargument to the other dominant philosophies of his time, those of Frederich Nietzsche, Max Weber, and Karl Marx, each of whom proposed materialist solutions to the ills of human life. Marx decried the material horrors visited upon workers by Victorian capitalism, but saw no solution, no peace, beyond more struggle. Transcendent values — the ones that might’ve justified his concern for workers — were so much, well, humbug. Weber took a more nuanced view, believing that hard work and the system of capitalist prosperity was a religious good, but acknowledging that it came with dangers. 

“Today the routines of everyday life challenge religion,” said Weber. “Many old gods ascend from their graves; they are disenchanted and hence take the form of impersonal forces.” Of “religious asceticism,” he wrote that “victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs its support no longer.” The “modern economic order,” Weber believed, “is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force.” 

“Perhaps,” he added, “it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burned.” 

Coal is a theme in A Christmas Carol, as well. One of its last lines invokes the ever-important coal of 19th-century England. Scrooge says: “A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you, for many a year! I’ll raise your salary, and endeavor to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop, Bob!” he remarks. “Make up the fires, and buy another coal-scuttle before you dot another i, Bob Cratchit!” This greeting comes with “an earnestness that could not be mistaken.” Scrooge has been changed forever. 

Cratchit was hardly burning the last ton of fossilized coal, nor are we approaching that landmark even now, though Dickens’s carol and the spirit of mercy persist, even in the modern world. In his showing, we may gain wealth and power, but only if we do good with it. In the modern world, we may be trying to forget about his form of charity, but we haven’t entirely. As technology companies with power that rivals great nations erect sprawling data centers, moguls like Elon Musk promise “there will be universal high income” in the near future. Shame lingers, at least for now. 

Tom Holland once described “the supreme paradox of Christian history” as the existence of “a faith that became powerful by virtue of enshrining as its symbol someone utterly powerless.” The challenge for Christians in the industrial West is to find every Scrooge in our midst and make a Pabst out of him. Starting with the Scrooge inside ourselves, of course.

A Christmas Carol is a tale of two tragedies. There is the tragedy that is destined to happen: the death of Tiny Tim, victim of the structural violence of destitution. But the second tragedy belongs to the past. The tragedy that turned a kind and humble person into a monster. This is the tragedy that defines Ebenezer Scrooge.

Scrooge is a darkness surrounded by an even more impenetrable darkness. “Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it,” Dickens says of his protagonist’s uncharitable and barren homestead. Scrooge is indistinguishable from his shadow. Dante’s hell was not ablaze but resided in the frozen depths of torment and despair. Scrooge belongs to those depths. He befriends the misery, revels in the isolation, walks through its gates with a pessimistic howl. His soul is as cold as the steel nail, which Dickens invokes from the outset to describe his dead partner, Jacob Marley. Scrooge, in short, is dead while alive, “secured from surprise”, emotionally adrift from the fires of the world.

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His behaviour would stand out as markedly different from the ostentatious and lavish displays of wealth that were so often paraded by the merchant colonists of Victorian Britain. Theirs was, after-all, a time of extraordinary splendour. And at the time, while Dickens was writing the complementary social tales of Oliver Twist and Bleak House, the wealth extracting machine of the British Empire was in primal overdrive (especially in the mining colonies at home). But what matters is not whether Scrooge is exuberant or thrifty. His penance must be explained through his quest for accumulation. And so Dickens invokes a ghost that goes beyond the tale of one miserable man: the ghost who clanks the chains of social forces. Who really carries those chains?

This is a radical move from Dickens, as he seeks to turn this world on its head. He transforms the powerful into the powerless, so that they become forced witnesses without the capacity to bring about change. What also made Dickens revolutionary for his time was his conjuring of the idea that humans were not born evil or sinister. If A Christmas Carol has us reflecting upon the notion that residing even in the darkest of hearts, there is still the glimmer of a flame that is the spark of our humanity, it is also a tale of how we might all be the products of circumstance.

But this also demands more from us. Most would shed a tear for the mercilessly fated child who lays dead in the snow. It’s far more difficult to help others break a frozen sea within. Charity works in mysterious ways, Dickens advises. It concerns both the materially and spiritually impoverished.

It shouldn’t be lost on us today that Christmas has become thoroughly commodified and its meaning so often stripped of its spiritual aspiration. If the ghost of Christmas past might remind us of all the wasteful products we have bought, the ghost of the present would still have us buying more, while the yet to pass would have us still unfulfilled, because the desire to find meaning in stuff is never fully satisfied.

Dickens was a materialist. He knows that bread matters. But he invests material objects with subjective resonance. Doorknockers become harrowing faces, staircases become passages into the desolation of the empty withering heart, and the flickering candle a threshold point between the frosted breath of an aging man and the ephemeral smoke of a ghostly passenger. He who lived for too long and felt too little is one breath away from a soon to be extinguished life. There are here, then, questions of the mystical. That blue melancholic flame symbolises a precarious existence burning in a twilight hour that is torn between wanting its stay and yet willing its vanishing. Death is ever present in this novella, always at the moment of its arrival, yet always deferred.

And yet, our crises laden times are very different from when Dickens was crafting his tale. During the industrial age there was a viable sense of community, where people found support on a daily basis. There were public theatres for people to frequent and express their togetherness. There were libraries in which children collectively learned and bettered their plight. There were organisations that took seriously the local needs of impoverished peoples in personal ways, not just to medicate, but to assure through genuine appeals to solidarity and friendship. And there were neighbours who helped each other through the hard times.

Such bonds have largely given way to a vapid individualism, which has ended up having the poor fight among themselves, all the while the coldness of the digital screen seduces us. Moreover, while Dickens recalls how the “surplus population” was exploited in workhouses (much to the scorn of Scrooge who would without care have them work or have them dead), today we are creating “Armies of the Permanently Unemployed” who are being abandoned by an entirely different yet no less cold-hearted world.

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Dickens was no doubt writing from a distinctly religious perspective, but he still managed to touch something human in us all. Humanism and spirituality were not opposed. Yet in today’s apparently secular age, hyper-moralism is so emboldened, the past, present, and future so seemingly assured, that room for the unknown is all but denied. Scrooge would never survive the trials of Twitter and the moral policing that screenshots every indiscretion. We have lost the mysticism, we have lost the capacity to fail, we have lost the ability to be as fallible as a Scrooge, and most important, we have lost the spirit of forgiveness that could be afforded to people who are utterly disagreeable.

But while we can’t be too literal translating the 19th century into the present, we can appreciate the deeper concerns Dickens raises about the human condition. As Ebenezer is brought face to face with his own disregarded tomb and the realisation that in the final act of reckoning, none of it mattered, he is forced to look back upon his life as if he were already dead. It is the deepest of all philosophical questions: how do you live through the tragedy of life while understanding the ephemerality of existence. Dickens, through Scrooge, forces us to consider what life might look like from the perspective of our own death. How might each of our lives change, were we to be open to the company of that apparition? Only the ghosts of time will tell.