Scrooge as Political Allegory. (No, I haven’t lost my mind.)

December 18, 2006 by mugsy.

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One for the holidays. Pardon my indulgence.

I have my own private tradition. Laugh if you will, but every year, without fail, I watch “Scrooge“, the 1970 musical version of “A Christmas Carol“, staring British actor Albert Finney. While most people prefer the old 1951 B/W Alastair Sim version, Finney’s Scrooge is my favorite. Back when I was in Grade School, the entire school was treated to a free viewing in the school auditorium every year for three years. After I moved, my new school did not continue the tradition, so I continued it at home. No matter how many times I watch it, I still find it inspirational and Finney’s portrayal the most natural.

As many of us learned in high school, author Charles Dickens, England’s most celebrated author of the time, used his short story to “sneak in” a descriptive portrayal of the crushing poverty that was consuming London’s poor, in a book Queen Victoria was certain to read. Maybe it had some impact, because 17 years later, Queen Victoria abolished “Debtors Prison”.

Watching the movie again this year, I found myself thinking about it in a “political context” for the first time. It dawned on me that the early Ebeneezer Scrooge is the epitome of the extreme Far Right Conservative, and later his redeemed self, the epitome of the extreme Far Left Liberal. Follow me on this.

The early Scrooge described The Poor as “lazy” and “idle”. Consumed by the pursuit of wealth and openly hostile to anyone not like himself (the only person he didn’t hate was his late partner Marley, an older overweight father-figure that taught Scrooge his evil ways. Sound like anyone we know?). He is ignorant (I don’t mean “dumb”, I mean willfully uninformed), prejudiced and abusive to others. And it will take nothing short of an Act of God to redeem him. Even after a haunting by Marley and two additional ghosts, Scrooge “stays the course”, denies what he has seen with his own eyes, and doesn’t come around until faced with catastrophe.

A fact most people don’t know about the character of Ebeneezer Scrooge was that his mother died in childbirth to him. Dickens does come right out and tell us this in his story, but it is easy to figure out from the facts he gives us about his main character. His father blamed him for her death and sent him off to boarding school for most of his childhood. The sister he adored, Fran, would of had to of been his older sister, which probably became like a mother to him.

The nephew that Scrooge so despises, Harry, was Fran’s only child. Like her mother, Fran died in childbirth (”died a woman”), and like his father, Scrooge blames Harry for the death of his beloved sister.

These “facts” are only hinted at in Dickens’s famous book. It would have been completely inappropriate to describe such things in a family-type book in 1843, so Dickens only hinted at these facts, depending on readers to fill in the blanks for themselves (sadly, most don’t, and I have yet to see a movie version pick up on these crucial character-defining facts).

So we can include a dysfunctional family with abusive father-figure and a warped sense of family into the mix. Work it in however you see fit (or not at all if that suites your sensibilities).

After his redemption, Scrooge becomes the personification of the kind of Liberal that gives we Progressives a bad name. Charitable to the point of reckless disregard. Sweeter than candy to the poor and destitute among him. Trusting that the people he whipped like dogs for years will simply accept his miraculous transformation and embrace him despite the Hell he put them through for years.

Yet, it is the Later Scrooge that we all strive to be, not the hard-nosed, parsimonious curmudgeon he was before… the guy we tell children to beware of in the dark.

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