Have a Capitalist Christmas: The Critique of Christmas Time in "A Christmas Carol"

An audience member's gleeful first-hand account of Charles Dickens's public reading of "A Christmas Carol" unwittingly exposes an often overlooked contradiction in the story's climax: "Finally, there is Scrooge, no longer a miser, but a human being, screaming at the 'conversational' boy in Sunday clothes, to buy him the prize turkey 'that never could have stood upon his legs, that bird'" (96). Perhaps he is no longer a miser but, by this description, Scrooge still plays …

…than local, scale. In either case, a rereading is what Dickens solicits, and not only for his own canonization. When "A Christmas Carol" marks the memory of various Christmases for readers, they will, if not perceive all time in such a form, at least live in a literary Christmas Past, Present, and Future. Works Cited: Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol. USA: Bantam Books, 1997. Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980.