This post has been contributed by Renata Goroshkova, St. Petersburg State University, Russia. Read Renata’s other posts here and here.

Charles Dickens came to reading age during the blossoming of Romanticism (1, p. 31), and Romantic ideas were the ground on which Charles Dickens was raised. It is believed, that the cult of music was one of the brightest features of Romanticism. Music was thought by the Romantics to be the art of all arts. Novalis wrote that ‘In all good societies music should be heard at intervals’ (2, p. 58). Almost every Romantic author left in his works, both critical and literary, statements on music as the foundation of the world, and these ideas were echoed in the poetics of Romanticism.

The most prominent influence of the Romantic cult of music in Dickens is manifested in A Christmas Carol in Prose. The very title of this story, A Christmas Carol, testifies to its musicality (as well as the fact that A Christmas Carol, like any carol, has staves – as the chapters of the story are called). Dickens scholars define this work as a benchmark of the Christmas story genre, noting also that it contains elements of the poetics of vision and the Gothic narrative, but ignoring the author’s hints in the title. Meanwhile, the musicality and lyricism of this story are not limited to the title. Music permeates the work at the narratological, stylistic, and generic levels, making it not just a story, but, indeed, a “song in prose”.

‘God rest ye merry gentleman, let nothing you dismay, Remember Christ our Saviour was born on Christmas Day…’

In Dickens’s time the words of this famous carol were sung on the streets of Britain and in homes every Christmas Eve. This hymn is interrupted by Scrooge at the beginning of the story: ‘The owner of one scant nose, gnawed and mumbled by the hungry cold as bones are gnawed by dogs, stooped down at Scrooge’s keyhole to regale him with a Christmas carol; but, at the first sound of

“God bless ye, merry gentleman,

May nothing you dismay!”

Scrooge seized the ruler with such energy of action that the singer fled in terror, leaving the keyhole to the fog, and even more congenial frost’ (3, p. 13). Musical and textual allusions to this Christmas carol can be found throughout the story. At the beginning of this Christmas carol we hear: ‘Remember Christ our Saviour was born on Christmas Day’. Dickens, however, begins his story with a contrasting statement: that Marley was dead (3, p. 7). The original carol goes on: 

‘From God our Heavenly Father

A blessed angel came’.

The angel informs the virgin Mary about events to come. In A Christmas Carol in Prose it is not an angel that comes to the sinner Scrooge, but the ghost of Marley, his business partner, and this ghost does not have good news: ‘I have none to give. It comes from other regions, Ebenezer Scrooge, and is conveyed by other ministers, to other kind of men’ (3,p. 23). The carol relates the events of the Gospel: how the shepherds came to the newborn baby. Similarly, three spirits came to Scrooge. While he in no way symbolizes the child of God, both carols end on the same joyful note, as Scrooge exclaims: ‘I’m quite a baby’ (3, p. 75).

The soloist of Dickens’s Christmas carol is the narrator, who can interrupt his “song” and break into the text, noting that he is not omniscient even in his own narrative: ‘Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a doornail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the country’s done for me’ (3, p. 6).

While reading A Christmas Carol in Prose, we seem to hear a certain melody, which is created not from notes, but from sound images within the text. The reader has to hear how ‘the sound resounded through the house like thunder’ (3,p. 15), and how a bell ‘swung so softly in the outset that it scarcely made a sound; but soon it rang out loudly, and so did every bell in the house’ (3, p. 16), and how ‘the cellar door flew open with a booming sound’ (3, p. 16), and how ‘the spirit raised a frightful cry’ (3, p. 19). Music accompanies Dickens’s hero not only in the scariest, but also in the best moments of his life. In the last stave, after his rebirth, Scrooge hears ‘A merry Christmas to you’, and ‘of all the blithe sounds he had ever heard,those [words] were the blithest in his ears’ (3, p. 76).

There are many visual images in the story that alternate with sound images, creating a specific rhythm. Let’s see it in a small passage from the text (visual images will be highlighted bold, and sound images italicised):

‘The fire-place was an old one, built by some Dutch merchant long ago, and paved all round with quaint Dutch tiles, designed to illustrate the Scriptures. There were Cains and Abels, Pharaohs’ daughters, Queens of Sheba, Angelic messengers descending through the air on clouds like feather-beds, Abrahams, Belshazzars,Apostles putting off to sea in butter-boats, hundreds of figures to attract his thoughts; and yet that face of Marley, seven years dead, came like the ancient Prophet’s rod, and swallowed up the whole. If each smooth tile had been a blank at first, with power to shape some picture on its surface from the disjointed fragments of his thoughts, there would have been a copy of old Marley’s head on every one.

“Humbug!” said Scrooge; and walked across the room. After several turns, he sat down again. As he threw his head back in the chair, his glance happened to rest upon a bell, a disused bell, that hung in the room, and communicated for some purpose now forgotten with a chamber in the highest story of the building. It was with great astonishment, and with a strange, inexplicable dread, that as he looked, he saw this bell begin to swing. It swung so softly in the outset that it scarcely made a sound; but soon it rang out loudly, and so did every bell in the house’ (3, p. 15-16). The whole story progresses in this way, alternating sound and visual images (or modes of perception, as it is called in narratology).

Another rhythmical device, which was described by Vladimir Nabokov as one of Dickens’s favourite methods, is the ‘AND-AND-AND device’ (4, p. 121). This device looks like a specific verbal crescendo and also creates a festive Christmas atmosphere in the story: ‘The chuckle with which he said this, and the chuckle with which he paid for the turkey, and the chuckle with which he paid for the cab, and the chuckle with which he recompensed the boy, were only to be exceeded by the chuckle with which he sat down breathless in his chair again and chuckled till he cried’ (3, p. 76). The analogue of this is the ‘NO-NO-NO device’: ‘External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty’ (3, p. 8).

Nabokov also noticed in his lectures that ‘Dickens enjoys a kind of incantation, a verbal formula repetitively recited with growing emphasis; an oratorical, forensic device’ (4, p. 118). Keywords and crucial phrases repeat in the story: the wish of “God bless you” alternates with Scrooge’s favourite interjection, “Humbug!”.

Dickens demonstrates that even the motion of the clock could be shown in the prose both rhythmically and poetically:

‘“Ding, dong!”

“A quarter past,” said Scrooge, counting.

“Ding, dong!”

“Half-past!” said Scrooge.

“Ding, dong!”

“A quarter to it,” said Scrooge.

“Ding, dong!”

“The hour itself,” said Scrooge, triumphantly, “and nothing else!”’

(3, p. 25)

The rhythm of A Christmas Carol appears not only at the figurative and lexical levels, but also at the level of episode and unfolding action. Rhythmically, at the same time, after midnight, spirits come to Scrooge. The rhythm of the whole story depends on these visits: each stave is a new event. Sometimes, however, as happens with the second spirit, the narrator delays the event, forcing Scrooge almost to fever-pitch: ‘Now, being prepared for almost anything, he was not by any means prepared for nothing; and, consequently, when the Bell struck One, and no shape appeared, he was taken with a violent fit of trembling. Five minutes, ten minutes, a quarter of an hour went by, yet nothing came. All this time, he lay upon his bed, the very core and centre of a blaze of ruddy light, which streamed upon it when the clock proclaimed the hour; and which, being only light, was more alarming than a dozen ghosts, as he was powerless to make out what it meant, or would be at; and was sometimes apprehensive that he might be at that very moment an interesting case of spontaneous combustion, without having the consolation of knowing it’ (3, p. 40).

Every song can be sung anew, and Scrooge also has several versions of his life. He sings his song in a new way, turning from a greedy merchant to a good old man: ‘He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man as the good old City knew’ (3, p. 79). The fifth stave is like a rewritten first, as Scrooge has a chance to return old debts: he meets ‘the portly gentleman who had walked into his counting-house the day before’ (3, p.77), visits his nephew, who is so glad that ‘it is a mercy he didn’t shake his arm off’ (3, p. 78), increases the clerk’s salary, and becomes a second father to the clerk’s son – tiny Tim.

So, the musicality of A Christmas Carol in Prose is one of the main features of this story, and contributes to its uniqueness. Dickens used this method in many of his novels, but the author first developed the technique in the Christmas stories of the 1840s.

A short remark: This paper was written for the journal ‘Vestnik of Saint Petersburg University. Language and Literature’ in 2011 (№ 3, p. 42-46). A lot of water has passed under that bridge, and many theoretical books have been read and some new aspects of the musicality of Dickens’s prose have been detected since that period, but the music is still there. That is why in this post I have decided to leave everything as it was in my first article, even though by now I have dramatically changed the methodology of my research.

1. Stone H. Dickens and the Invisible World. London: Indiana University Press, 1979.

2. Novalis. Philosophical Writings. Transl. and Ed. M. M. Stoljar: State University of New York Press, 1997.

3. Dickens, Charles. Christmas Books. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 1995.

4. Nabokov, Vladimir. Lectures on Literature. Ed. Fredson Bowers. San Diego: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.