Dickens and the Common Good
BAH. HUMBUG.
‘But you were always a good man of business, Jacob,’ faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself.”
Missed and misused opportunities to work kindly to help those with less:that was the message the apparition of his old business partner, Jacob Marley, who had been as cruel and money-grabbing as Scrooge was still, confronted him with now in his bed chamber, and Scrooge did not like it one bit.
‘Business!’ cried the ghost, wringing its hands again. ‘Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance and benevolence were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!’
Ah, business. What is our business, anyway?
That is the question Charles Dickens answers in A Christmas Carol.
It’s that message, reminding us to be humane above all else, that we need to hear.
But at this moment it rings arrestingly strange in America, doesn’t it? when anything that helps the common good is proclaimed to be wasteful, just a bunch of ‘entitlements’ —I hate that word, coined by the Republicans as a negative spin on the more accurate terms ‘safety nets’ and ‘common welfare.’
The common welfare? Our business?
“Aren’t there workhouses?” Scrooge asks the men who have come to his cold, dark office seeking donations to help the poor, about prisons for the poor, because in his mind the answer for poverty is prison.
“Many can’t go there; and many would rather die,” one of the alms-seekers says.
“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “then they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
“Bah. Humbug.”
When Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in 1843, the people of his Great Britain were suffering from massive poverty and illiteracy. British poor house prisons were full to overflowing. British education had been designed for the children of the wealthy and elite, not for all. So most British children remained illiterate into adulthood, and whole families remained poor through generations.
Dickens himself had been a poor child before he gained some status and wealth as a writer of serial magazine stories. He never forgot. When he visited America in the early 1840s, he was struck by the difference a free public nationalized education system was making there. There was definitely upward mobility for some folk. Opportunity applied to every child equally.
That is why, hidden under the robe of The Ghost of Christmas Present . . .
“The boy is Ignorance. The girl is Want,” the ghost said. “Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.”
Doom. Remember that word.
AN ORDINARY STORY
My parents, South Dakota dust bowl and depression-era children, had nothing when they married in 1944. Over the ensuing years they prospered. Some would have us believe they simply pulled themselves up by the bootstraps, living the classic capitalistic fairy tale. But it was no accident that they prospered during the New Deal and War on Poverty eras, when concern for the common good was at its apex in the United States. Good Will Toward Our Own Men and Women, Young and Old, provided education and means.
But by the 1990s, just as they entered their retirement years, with Regan’s ”trickle down economics” and other empty ideas in vogue, my parents’ economic situation, like that of so many others, began to sink again. The skyrocketing cost of health insurance alone was a major cause of this, taking more and more of their income until their deaths in 2008 and 2019.
THE ROLE OF THE ELITE AND CAPITALISM
So, back to Ebenezer Scrooge. What is he but an elite capitalist?
And what is America now but a country controlled by elite capitalists that serve elite capitalists?
Now gone is shared risk and shared prosperity in America. Gone is the benevolent philosophy that the common American citizen deserves to prosper, and children and senior citizen to live in dignity. Corporations make larger profits than ever, but share them less than ever with workers in the form of living wages. People in leadership positions, such as many CEOs, police and fire chiefs, public school administrators, lead by enriching themselves first now.
(A retired fire captain I know owns five new or vintage vehicles and two houses in two different states. A retired school superintendent also had two houses, and every year, whether teachers received raises or not, he got a raise the size of a teacher’s salary.)
Services to families, students, senior citizens, and the poor—in other words, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, early childhood education programs and the like—were wrongly labelled “entitlement programs” in the 1990s by Republican leaders, so they could be lopped, chopped and discontinued without community leaders or Republicans feeling guilty. This was so tricky of them, because ‘entitlement’ is such a nasty word to use to spin the story and hide the truth of their own greed.
Journalists, surprisingly, just accepted that new label of “entitlements” and use it regularly now, without ever breaking down what this change in terminology negatively implies about these programs or the average American citizen. Journalists, of all people, should carefully examine the words they use, instead of parroting one group or another.
Taxes and regulations, too, which often serve the common good, are now spun as “evil” and “anti-American.” Instead of loyalty to our country as defined in the Constitution, we have displaced loyalty to narcissistic leaders and political figures sold out to the highest bidder. They, too, rob shamelessly from the taxes we pay government to, in part, aid us in our lives, to pad their own personal wealth.
Capitalism has become the new shining star of America, instead of democracy. The original idea of a ‘shining city on the hill’ was not about capitalism, but liberty. We fail to grasp that capitalism has no morality or integrity unless combined with something like democracy and concern for the common good.
Capitalism alone is ruthless, as the unredeemed Scrooge embodies. Scrooge has no concern for the common good when we first meet him.
Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses? he asks the visitors to his office seeking alms for the poor.
And of growing poverty and its ills,
“‘Deny it!’ cried the Spirit, (of Christmas to come) stretching out his hand towards the city. “Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse! And bide the end!”
“‘Have they no refuge or resource?’ cried Scrooge there in the graveyard.
“‘Are there no prisons? said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. ‘Are there no workhouses?’”
What Scrooge fails so miserably to understand is that refuges and resources cost money, and when the rich squirrel away their money for themselves like this covetous Scrooge and many of our present-day tech CEOs, there isn’t anything left for the poor or the ill or the down-trodden.
GOVERNMENT’S ROLE
If the common welfare is our business, then the common agent is our government. Unlike Victorian England, the United States of America has a social contract—“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, ... to promote the general welfare ... do ordain and establish this CONSTITUTION for the United States of America.”
To promote the general welfare. There it is in black and white.
America offers us a social contract. In turn for paying our taxes, some of those taxes will come back to us and serve the common good by protecting us, our families, our livelihoods and our property. All of us. Not just the rich. Not just the powerful. All of us. The ensuing stable society will benefit us all.
NGOs, churches and charities can augment this, but they’re no substitute for benevolent government. And many of them come with strings attached. Government is our one all-encompassing collective representative. It reaches every American.
The popular call for less government is misguided: what we need is good government. Government that does not spin its own people as dishonestly accepting ‘entitlements’, and so to be shunned, derided, despised, somehow deserving of their own awful state, be it poverty or homelessness or sickness. Such spinning aims to make them something less than human to justify the spinners being something less than humane themselves.
This is happening right now as the Trump administration ignores Dickens’ warning about Ignorance and Want. Tearing apart our health care and public school systems and our safety nets like social security, medicare and medicaid are exactly that. Trump is taking the humanity out of government because, as an inhumane man himself, he doesn’t value it.
Government should never be about revenge, but especially not personal revenge. It should never be run by narcissists, who care only about themselves. And it should never, never be run by people who don’t respect the law and the Constitution.
My neighbor was so excited about a ‘business man’ president. But again, business alone has no moral ethic. It is devoid of concern for the common good unless coupled with democracy, with its call to care about each other.
“Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance and benevolence were, all, my business.”
Marley’s ghost is speaking directly to you and me.
From now on, when we vote, we should consider and value one thing above all else: is this candidate a person of integrity, honesty and true caring? A person of ‘charity, mercy, forbearance, benevolence.’
This is what really matters: the heart.
“Christmas time ... when men and women ... think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys,” says Scrooge’s nephew.
BETTER WAYS
Some of the Scandinavian countries are modern examples of this. Neither purely capitalistic nor socialistic, but a combination of the two, (yes, surprisingly, they can co-exist quite well under strongly democratic laws,) Norway puts a “high priority on strengthening and promoting an open, civil, democratic society,” said Tove Strand, Director of Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD.) Norway has willing tax-payers, who value the benefits that come back to them. Norway understands that the best safeguard of its own peace is prosperity for all its people and for the world.
When people aren’t desperate, when they have an education and a job that pays a living wage, when they prosper, they don’t need to turn to various kinds of trouble-making that might harm us directly or indirectly because they are desperate to find some way to survive or they are angry that the world doesn’t care. We are all more safe when the common welfare is attended to.
Why don’t our richest citizens understand this? Why aren’t they clamoring to pay their fair share of taxes to help in the common good? What is it about becoming rich that makes a person not less, but more selfish, covetous, stingy?
What if we, as a collective America, began to care again about the common good? What if we focused on compassion and love and generosity, which are the attributes at the heart of every major religion when it has not been perverted by false gods?
Is this not, after all, the very thing we call “the Christmas spirit”? Warm-hearted concern for the common good, as evidenced in a true change of heart that lasts the year through—and life long. It is the essential message of Christmas and any true religion or creed, even a secular creed or mission statement like a constitution of the people.
It is the essential message of ‘A Christmas Carol.’
THE ROLE OF RELIGION
So why do so many people who claim to be religious not understand this? Perhaps because they chose to see every one else as an “other,” allowing themselves to fear and even hate them. Other skin color, other faith, other sex, other orientation, other socioeconomic status, from other countries, of the other political party. Finally these people claiming to be religious spin the other as everything from rapists and murderers to code words for enemy, such as socialist or extreme or unpatriotic or election-stealers or even domestic terrorists, the enemy from within. In the process, such people mirror the Scrooge at the beginning of the book.
In their attitudes toward “others,” such people co-opt the name Christian or Muslim without adhering to the overwhelming tenant of their faith: love thy neighbor. Love thy neighbor. We are not called to revenge, nor hatred, nor selfishness, nor destruction, but to love.
We are called to love.
Do we see any love in Ebenezer Scrooge’s heart at the beginning of the story?
Oh! but he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.
WHY A CHRISTMAS CAROL TOUCHES OUR HEARTS
So, Dickens and his A Christmas Carol. Dickens suggests living in fear or hatred of “others” is a kind of living hell. He illustrates that accursed state in the person of Ebenezer Scrooge, estranged from his fellow men, estranged from love, devoid of all humanity, caring about nothing but personal profit.
Dickens’ ultimate message is that Scrooge’s hardness of heart—and our hardness of heart—do not have to remain that way. In fact, it is the very kindling of the embers of concern for his fellow-men and women under his flinty, grasping heart, and the fanning of those embers by spiritual visitations until he becomes a man of real compassion, that makes Scrooge’s story touch our hearts so profoundly. That make his a story not just of enlightenment, but of redemption, such as the ghosts of the dead he sees in the London air will never have. Marley’s Ghost and his spectral companions cry out a warning as the Ghost backs toward the raising window, and beckons to the unredeemed Scrooge and, indeed, the unredeemed us to approach and look out:
The air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went. Everyone of them wore chains like Marley’s Ghost; some few (they might be guilty governments) were linked together; none were free. Many had been personally known to Scrooge in their lives. He had been quite familiar with one old ghost in a white waistcoat, with a monstrous iron safe attached to its ankle, who cried piteously at being unable to assist a wretched woman with an infant, whom it saw below upon a doorstep. The misery with them all was clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power for ever.
Why do so many of us love A Christmas Carol? Because it is a redemption story. A redemption story for all mankind. For me, and for you. Because there can be no joy if we are not redeemed. Because, when love fades to hatred, life is not worth living.
Bitter, hateful, and selfish, that’s Ebenezer Scrooge and many of us. Heed the warnings of the ghosts now, before its too late. Redeem yourself. Become a part of humanity again. Because the deathbed is the great leveler, and I can guarantee you that, when you are on your deathbed, you will not be thinking of riches in monetary terms, but in human relationship terms.
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Claudia Riiff Finseth is a freelance writer in Washington State. All quotes in this essay are taken from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, 1843. This is a re-post of the article updated for 2025. It seems a good time to revisit it.
