Exuberant Experimentalist - Charles Dickens
Who would have assumed that Charles Dickens (1812-1870) was such an experimental writer? He began early in his life and at the beginning of the Victorian Age in 1836 with Sketches By Boz. Even a shorter work, A Christmas Carol (1843), holds many examples of daring and emotional writing. His style could be called poetic even though he never published a book of poetry. Dickens would have felt hog-tied if he had had to follow prescribed rhythm and rhyme—prose gave him full freedom to create.
I – STYLE
An insightful way to begin to look at his style would be his plenteous use of series. So many nouns: “Signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner.” Verbs: “The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait.’”(6) Adjectives: “Secret, and self-contained, and solitary.” (6) Adverbs: “Some shyly, some boldly, some gracefully, some awkwardly.” (42) Participles: “A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner!” (6)
He even uses series of sentences: “No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty.” (6) And he sometimes iterates the same sentence to build suspense in succeeding paragraphs: “Marley was as dead as a door-nail.” (5) In other places he repeats the same adjective: “His sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend and sole mourner.” (5) Notice that Dickens is scrupulous about the parallelism of his sentence structure.
So many of these techniques would be employed in poetry. For instance we have interjections: “Mind!” (5) “Oh!” (6) “Foggier yet!” (14) “Woe is me!” (23) Alliteration: “Rolled, and roared, and raged.” (69) Onomatopoeia: “Clash, clang, hammer, ding, dong, bell.” (100) Interrogative: “Scrooge knew he was dead?” (5) Interrupter: “Once upon a time—of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve—old Scrooge sat busy in his counting-house.” (7)
His exuberance seems to have no end. Simile: “The owner of one scant young nose, gnawed and mumbled by the hungry cold as bones are gnawed by dogs.” (14) Personification: “The ancient tower of a church, whose gruff old bell was always peeping slyly down at Scrooge.” (13) Puns: “More of gravy than of grave.” (21) At times the narrator steps in: “The mention of Marley’s funeral brings me back to the point I started from.” (5) And the entire story is laden with irony and double-meaning. Marley’s ghost reveals to Scrooge that even as a living partner, “I have sat invisible beside you many and many a day.” (25) They were sadly not really friends.
II – SCENES
We could go on and on into minutiae about the poetic devices Dickens employs. However, several scenes best bring his experimental originality to the fore. As he waits for the first ghost, “The air filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went.” (27) It is a Hieronymus Bosch painting come to fiendish life.
The first Ghost of Christmas Past shows Scrooge how as a young man he used to dance and love life. “Advance and retire, hold hands with your partner, bow and curtsey; corkscrew; thread-the-needle, and back again to your place.” (43) The Ghost of Christmas Present introduces the Christmas feast: “Turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch.” (53) We learn so much about the mid-Victorian diet.
Londoners were vigorous and animated at this season: “The people made a rough, but brisk and not unpleasant kind of music, in scraping the snow from the pavement in front of their dwellings, and from the tops of their houses.” (54) But they knew and cursed Scrooge for his miserliness: “Oh God! to hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust!” (65) The spirit took Scrooge to various places in the world where people were suffering: alms-houses, hospitals, jails, mines. All they saw were ignorance, want, doom. As an example, “They were a boy and a girl. Yellow, meager, ragged, scowling, wolfish.” (78)
Finally the last phantom, the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come, showed Scrooge the ultimate truth if he did not change his ways. “The ways were foul and narrow; the shops and houses wretched; the people half-naked, drunken, slipshod, ugly.” (84) “Walled in by houses; overrun by grass and weeds, the growth of vegetation’s death, not life; choked up with too much burying; fat with repleted appetite. A worthy place!” (97) The sarcasm takes its toll on Scrooge who, viewing his potential gravesite, finally reforms.
Of the Christmas stories Charles Dickens wrote for magazines, A Christmas Carol caught the imagination of the public the most. He structured it in what he called five staves, to hint at the idea of music. And as you have observed, the musical flow—like poetry-- played a major part in the narration as well as in the style. This tale held humor and much exaggeration but also misery and the reality of death. That is most likely what appeals to readers even today—the panoply of life in all of its stages, told vigorously and honestly.