![]() ![]() The Ghost of Christmas Present takes Scrooge to witness the household of Belle (Scrooge’s ex-fiancée) and sees her family joyfully celebrating Christmas. This warning becomes even more apparent in an earlier part of the Carol which, un-coincidentally, involves another less palatable turkey. Dickens is, rather, warning us that this new consumerism is going to change the old ways – for better and for worse. Should we suspect Scrooge of “fowl play”?Ī wider reading of the Carol suggests not, that Scrooge had indeed transformed into a virtuous person. One might read the act of Scrooge gifting the grander turkey as the “humbugging” of this family’s private and traditional celebration of Christmas. Scrooge also becomes aware that everyone in this household “had had enough” to eat. Scrooge’s gift of a turkey is especially interesting when we know that, with the help of the Ghost of Christmas Present, he witnessed the Cratchits celebrating Christmas and banqueting on not a turkey but a goose of “universal admiration”. One of the striking things about Scrooge’s act of gifting the Cratchits a giant prize turkey was that for Scrooge this gesture was the grandest of jokes – so much of a joke that Scrooge “chuckled till he cried”. The act of Scrooge sending a gigantic prize turkey to the Cratchits represented a radical change in not only Scrooge’s character, from the cynical miser to the generous spendthrift, but also personified a radical socioeconomic transformation.Ī transformation from a more puritan capitalism focused on the accumulation of money to a more hedonistic consumerism focusing on maximising consumption. At that time, the turkey was an exotic bird, too expensive for the common person to purchase. ![]() In Victorian London, when Dickens wrote the Carol, Christmas day was commonly celebrated by consuming, not a grand turkey, but rather a humble goose. ![]() Scrooge’s gifting of this turkey represents a radical transformation in the ethos of Victorian culture - a change in which Dickens, as one of the great conjurers of the modern world, played no small part. Scrooge’s act of gifting this prize turkey to Cratchit is not only of interest because it relates to the origin of the practice of serving the Christmas turkey it is also of interest because it represents a grand symbolic act. The first social act of this newly reformed Scrooge is to purchase and then gift a giant prize turkey to the family of his underpaid and overworked clerk, Cratchit.įew things raise the eyebrows of social-anthropologists more than the practice of “gifting” because, as the French sociologist Marcel Mauss realised, gifting practices provide a window into the functioning of society. Scrooge awakens on Christmas morning miraculously transformed into a virtuous man who playfully embraces the joy of social living and in particular the celebration of Christmas. Through this supernatural awakening he becomes increasingly concerned about the plight of his fellow human beings. On Christmas Eve, the story goes, Scrooge is haunted by a series of spirits who reveal to him, his past, present and future. ![]() ‘Marley’s Ghost’, original illustration by John Leech from A Christmas Carol (1843). ![]()
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