Above: A copy of the hoax article reposted by Twitter user @SketchesbyBoze: https://twitter.com/SketchesbyBoze/status/1467334150222925828

Contributed by Spencer Dodd, PhD Student, Louisiana State University.

In early December, a screenshot of a fake London Times article by “Dickie Canine” circulated on social media for a few days. The “article” in question featured an image of Jim Carrey as Scrooge clinging to a banister with the punchy title “Wokery is nothing new and for that we can blame Charles Dickens.”

As extravagant and bizarre as this appears, it did not immediately strike me as satire for two reasons: 1) I could easily imagine something this deranged and ridiculous getting published to farm clicks, and 2) I vaguely remembered that the Wall Street Journal ran essentially a less hyperbolic but unironic version of this piece last year.

Sure enough, I did some digging and found last year’s WSJ article by investment bankers Phil Gramm and Mike Solon, as well as a similarly titled article by Rob Long also published by WSJ in 2015. The article by Gramm and Solon entitled “In Defense of Scrooge, Whose Thrift Blessed the World” begins by citing Carol’s cultural ubiquity to introduce the circuitous argument that the long-term reduction of poverty caused by investors like Scrooge justified the short-term suffering of the Victorian poor. This is quite a stretch, given the abject vistas of Victorian poverty provided by writers like Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell. Gramm and Solon also arguably misread Carol here, given that Scrooge pointedly does not reinvest his profits in the community until after his redemption. The original text makes it quite clear that Scrooge’s miserly practices squeeze others to enrich himself while he lives on the bare minimum and jealously guards his dragon’s hoard. In addition to his mistreatment of Bob Cratchit, Scrooge’s business “produces” little and extracts pennies from the less fortunate. So, it is a reach to seriously argue that Scrooge’s business model has the virtues ascribed to it by Gramm and Solon. Of course, given Carol’s status as a “culture text” (a text so widely circulated and entrenched within a culture that it seems to take on a life of its own) and the novella’s multitude of adaptations, some slippage from the details of the original text is to be expected. As Emily Moody wrote in a recent article in a Dickens Quarterly, “Although the text as a whole has been called a ‘culture text,’ the definition of which refers to viewing the Carol ‘as not so much of a cultural artefact but as an ongoing cultural process’ (Chitwood 675), there is a sense in which the novella gives a printed, visible form to Christmas Time itself” (401). The interpretive tension between viewing Carol as an “ongoing process” and an original, “authentic” text provides an interesting prism for exploring conversations about the cultural work performed through and around Carol.

Intrigued by both these odd uses of Carol and Moody’s article, I did some more digging and discovered that “defending Scrooge” is an established journalistic genre, emerging every December to haunt editorial pages across the Anglosphere. Publishing pro-Scrooge opinion pieces really picked up steam as a trend around 2008–2010, an uptick contemporaneous with the ‘08 financial crisis and Robert Zemeckis’s A Christmas Carol (2009) featuring Jim Carrey as Scrooge and animated visuals that oscillate between charming and the darkest depths of the uncanny valley. In addition to opinion pieces, my search also turned some sports commentary comparing the defensive strategies of various sports teams to Scrooge, usually with the implication that these powerful defensive games prevented opponents from doing much (Alabama Football featured in multiple articles). These “Scroogeball” pieces, as examples of a related seasonal genre, demonstrate a key structural feature of “defense of Scrooge” articles more broadly: the references to Scrooge/Carol serve as brief introductory devices that grab the reader’s attention or fail spectacularly to do so. In the latter cases, sometimes the textual connection to Carol is as thin as the title and a few lukewarm sentences.

A 2009 article in the Tuscola County Advisor (rural Eastern Michigan) thus illustrates the genre’s characteristically thin or awkward engagement with Carol itself by beginning, rather boldly, with the declaration: “The book was written in 1843, Dickens was dismayed even then over the commercialization of the holiday.” The remainder of the piece expounds upon the columnist’s alienation from the commercialized rituals of Christmas, mostly upon generalized evidence and a few passing allusions to Dickens’s novella. In this way, the columnist projects contemporary anxieties about the commodification of Christmas culture (a staple Christmas movie theme, including Carol adaptations like 1988’s Scrooged) onto the source text to introduce and further an argument, a rhetorical strategy that recalls the WSJ opinion pieces mentioned earlier. A 2010 article by Jim Blasingame in the TimesDaily (Florence, AL) provides a clearer picture of how identification with Scrooge serves as a springboard for one’s claims: “As an avowed contrarian, it would be antithetical for me to feel obligated to follow everyone else. . . As a Christian, this is an important time in my faith life. And as a capitalist, the importance of holiday spending is not lost on me.” By making claims of identification like this, Blasingame uses the conceit of rehabilitating Scrooge to justify his personal gripes about the holiday season: “I just don’t care for what modern society hath wrought on this season, and if that makes me a Scrooge, guilty as charged.” Like the Tuscola County Advisor article, Blasingame chafes against the perceived consumerism and hollowness that has cheapened his holiday season experience. Following a series of humorous anecdotes along these lines, he concludes this “contrarian” piece by imagining a world where people could say “I know it’s the middle of July, but let’s help those people right now!” To me, this conclusion typifies the paradox of the genre: though many of these defenses of Scrooge claim the banner of contrarianism, conclusions like Blasingame’s seem in line with the themes of Carol (if still misunderstanding or disregarding the original story’s content) and present reasonable or at least unobjectionable conclusions.

However, another 2009 article (by a pastor incredibly named Rick Cross) airs arguments that are more fraught than Blasingame’s riffing. Cross employs the familiar strategy of using Scrooge to chafe against Christmas consumerism, this time to introduce a short history of the holiday’s significance mostly centered on Christmas’s murky roots in Northern European paganism and the holiday’s suppression under 16^th and 17^th century Puritan regimes. This all builds up to a diatribe against the “religious pluralism” that now threatens the holiday, a curious argument given the relatively accepted critical position that considers Carol a secular conversion narrative. Recently, Emily Moody has pushed back against this position (and particularly scholars like J. Hillis Miller who argue that Carol’s title is false advertising) by noting the structural and moral commonalities between Dickens’s novella and traditional Christmas carols (394, 408). A 1965 article by William E. Morris, which opens “As everyone knows, being called a ‘scrooge’ is bad” emphasizes that Dickens’s text is an individual conversion/redemption narrative at its core: “The carol sung here is a song of celebration for a Christmas birth that offers hope; it is not a song of thanks for revenge accomplished or for luck had by the poor” (46, 48). The perspectives offered by Miller and Morris seem to underlie many of the articles I have discussed here, in that these authors question Dickens’s motives in painting Scrooge so clearly as an arch-antagonist: e.g., the Gramm and Solon article directly calls Scrooge a caricature. A different avenue of questioning Dickens’s motives appears in No Future, where Lee Edelman reads Scrooge’s “redemption” as a forcible corrective that shackles him to notions of family and futurity he had avoided (53). Here, Edelman points to a premise that is also intelligible in adaptations like Douglas Bass’s Ebeneezer: The True Life Story of Ebeneezer Scrooge that depict Scrooge in a more favorable light. Perspectives like this rehabilitate Scrooge (sometimes with additions or changes to the original text), by suggesting that trauma, suffering, and misunderstanding made Scrooge who he is at the beginning of Carol as opposed to innate wickedness. The original text amply supports interpretations along those lines, but these adaptations typically diverge from the strictures of Dickens’s conversion narrative by expanding Scrooge’s backstory, adding new layers of detail to the miser’s traumatic experiences and/or misunderstood lifestyle. However, the complicated adaptation history of Carol is too vast a subject to begin here.

Lastly, the other WSJ article I mentioned earlier, written in 2015 by Rob Long—best known for his work on later seasons of the television show Cheers—provides both an excellent example of a “defense of Scrooge” and some metacommentary on the genre itself. Long begins the piece on a somber note and preserves this tone of high seriousness while introducing a series of increasingly ridiculous claims about his commitment to Scroogery. These claims begin with the by-now familiar paean against the commercialization of Christmas, though Long’s speaker utterly embraces consumerism despite railing against it. Rather than considering Carol a reaction to commercialization, Long considers it a cause and argues that the point of the novella is the same as the holiday: to receive large and expensive presents. He acknowledges that most critics of Carol disagree with this interpretation. Also, Long later argues that the biblical gifts of the Magi originally established this as the point of the holiday, though he once again concedes that most people disagree with this interpretation. Long rests his case with an anecdote about rigging a “Secret Santa” event among his friends and family to claim each and every large and expensive present for himself. The holiday continues unabated, however, as the other participants expected this from him. Long says this confirms his thesis that “Most people are irritating and selfish, especially around Christmastime,” which he also declares as the main point of Carol itself. Here, Long’s hyperbolic and reflexive argument plays with the conventions of Dickens’s tale and the huge cultural apparatus that now surrounds it to poke fun at our insularity, selfishness, and foibles. The self-aware tone of this piece makes it stand out among examples of this genre; Long’s invocations of the original text are transparently and humorously haphazard, perhaps poking fun at the genre’s use of Carol as an introductory device for a columnist’s seasonal rambling. The productivity and strangeness of this genre, which, as we have seen, has become a thriving holiday cottage industry over the past fifteen years or so, shows the continuing and evolving influence of A Christmas Carol as a culture text. The explosion of this genre in the Internet era also shows our appetite for clickbait and provocation, to be entertained by and engaged with texts en masse, much as early audiences of the Pickwick Papers eagerly awaited the next installment’s hijinks.

Works Cited

Blasingame, Jim. “In defense of scrooges everywhere.” TimesDaily (Florence, AL), 18 December 2010.

Cross, Rick. “Humbug: In defense of Scrooge.” DailyTimes-Call (Longmont, CO) 18 December 2009.

Dickens, Charles. “A Christmas Carol.” A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings, ed. Michael Slater, Penguin, 2003, pp. 27-118.

Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Duke UP, 2004. pp. 208.

Gramm, Phil, and Mike Solon. “In Defense of Scrooge, Whose Thrift Blessed the World.” Wall Street Journal – Online Edition, 24 December 2020.

Long, Rob. “In Defense of Scrooge.” Wall Street Journal (Online), 19 Dec. 2015, p. 1.

Moody, Emily. “Implausible and Inappropriate”? A Defense of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.” Dickens Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 4, December 2020, pp. 393-408.

Morris, William E. “The Conversion of Scrooge: A Defense of that Good Man’s Motivation.” Studies in Short Fiction, vol. 3, no. 1, Fall 1965, pp. 46-55. 2009. a. “In Defense of Scrooge.” Tuscola County Advisor (Caro, MI), 26 December 2009.