Christmas in the time of coronavirus: how Dickens’ classic tales take on new connotations
Books can help us understand our place in the world, even as it is gripped by a pandemic, and in times such as these, new meaning can be found in time-honoured festive fare
History will remember 2020 as a year in which everything was touched by the Covid-19 pandemic. The festive season is no exception, illustrated by the escalating arguments between those demanding Christmas as usual and those urging caution about congregating with family and friends.
The most urgent question of all – how Covid-19 will affect Santa Claus – has already been asked and answered by Dr Anthony Fauci. “Santa is exempt from this because Santa, of all the good qualities, has a lot of good innate immunity. So Santa is not going to be spreading any infections to anybody.”
There is not a vast amount of advice here on how to celebrate Yuletide during a plague. Shelley’s only mention of Christmas is to note that “half of England was under water”, which does little to lighten the mood.
Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron (circa 1351) has received a lot of attention because the spur for its 100 or so stories is none other than the Black Death. In 1348, Boccaccio begins, “There happened at Florence, the finest city in all Italy, a most terrible plague.”
The next part might sound all too familiar: “There, spite of all the means that art and human foresight could suggest, such as keeping the city clear from filth, the exclusion of all suspected persons, and the publication of copious instructions for the preservation of health […] it began to show itself […] in a sad and wonderful manner.”
Ten Florentines (seven women, three men) flee to the Tuscan hills, settling in the first villa they find. Over the next 10 days, they tell tales to pass the time, some of which have inspired great works of art of their own: Isabella, or The Pot of Basil by John Keats, William Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, and Molière’s The Confounded Husband all drew from Boccaccio’s original.
On the seventh day, Boccaccio’s Fiammetta narrates a yuletide story that isn’t so much plague-ridden as extremely Italian. A clever, mistreated woman teaches her pathologically jealous husband a lesson one Christmas Day. Convinced she is having multiple affairs, he disguises himself as a priest to hear her confess her infidelity.
The wife sees through the deception (the silly man alters his voice by putting stones in his mouth), and admits she loves a priest who enters the house through a particular door and utters magical words that put the husband to sleep. Inflamed by jealousy, he duly guards the door all night long, enabling his wife to sneak her handsome neighbour Filippo into their bedroom.
At the end, our heroine informs her other half of his stupidity, enabling Boccaccio to deliver the not-very-seasonal moral: “Behave like a man, and do not make a fool of yourself any longer, in the eyes of one who is acquainted with all your ways, as I am.”
We might be better served by using our experiences of Covid-19 to re-read some classic Christmas stories. And they don’t come any more classic or Christmassy than those written by Charles Dickens.
The main challenge is how to square our year of lockdowns and social distancing with Dickens’ exaltation of a “season of hospitality, merriment, and open-heartedness; the old year was preparing, like an ancient philosopher, to call his friends around him, and amid the sound of feasting and revelry to pass gently and calmly away”.
This is from Dickens’ first novel, The Pickwick Papers (1836), which includes a festive fable about a misanthropic, mean-spirited gravedigger called Gabriel Grub who might just fit the bill as a pandemic-friendly hero. Grub’s supernatural awakening is more or less a dress rehearsal for Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol (1843).
Grub, like Scrooge, reforms after being shown visions of his past and future, although in his case the messengers are a band of mischievous goblins. And like Scrooge, he eventually learns that those “who snarled at the mirth and cheerfulness of others, were the foulest weeds on the fair surface of the earth”. Only, Grub doesn’t share his new-found mirth and wisdom around his hometown. Instead, he walks away – exhibiting responsible distancing – only to return 10 years later, an older but happier man.
How the world will celebrate Christmas during Covid-19
Scrooge, of course, does the opposite; it is a measure of just how vile 2020 has been that the final proof of his reformation, spreading good cheer and charity around London, would today seem like a super-spreader event that would cause as much damage as his usual miserly self-isolation.
One could even interpret Scrooge’s initial repellent seclusion as a model for how to quarantine. “Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with gladsome looks, ‘My dear Mr Scrooge, how are you?’” Even the fear, expressed by “Old Joe” in the future vision of his death, that he was killed by a contagious disease proves unfounded. “I ain’t so fond of his company that I’d loiter around him for such things, if he did,” replies his maid.
Where we might be guided by A Christmas Carol is in its exaltation of home as a place of love, warmth and safety. Home is what the young, innocent Scrooge is banished from, and yearns for, in the chilly loneliness of his boarding school. He is rescued by his sister Fan, who tells him: “Home for good and all. Home for ever and ever. Father is so much kinder than he used to be, that home’s like Heaven.”
But the true, coronavirus-friendly hero of the story is Bob Cratchit. All he wants for Christmas is to leave work, Scrooge and London behind him and be with his family, to eat, drink and be merry.
Those protesting potential lockdowns across the world could read this same festive fairy tale as proof of their oppression: in the portrayal of Scrooge’s desolate isolation, the heavy chains binding Jacob Marley’s ghost, and the alternate reality of the Cratchits grieving the death of Tiny Tim.
Similar darkness touches Dickens’ final Christmas story, The Cricket on the Hearth (1845). Too saccharine for some contemporaries, it nevertheless bears curious comparison with Boccaccio’s yuletide parable from The Decameron. John Peerybingle, a decent but dim-witted carrier of goods and chattels, is conned by a Scrooge-like villain into believing he is being cuckolded by his blameless wife, Dot.
His eyes are opened by, among other devices, the titular cricket, who appears in fairy form to plead Dot’s case by reminding him of the beauty of their home. “Upon your own hearth; in the quiet sanctuary; surrounded by its gentle influences and associations; hear her! Hear me! Hear everything that speaks the language of your hearth and home!”
Of course, not everyone has such happy luxuries and at Christmas home can be a sad and solitary place. But for once, this might still be better than the alternatives. Don’t forget auld acquaintance. Stay home. Read a good, seasonal book. As Tiny Tim said: “A Merry Christmas, to us all.”
Let’s try to be there for the next one, too.
