“I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future!” Scrooge repeated, as he scrambled out of bed. “The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. Oh Jacob Marley! Heaven, and the Christmas Time be praised for this! I say it on my knees, old Jacob; on my knees!”
The redemption of Scrooge has, without a doubt, pleased more people than almost any other character development Dickens had ever created. And it has been written about by scholars since its first publication. But what is it about Scrooge’s reclamation that draws us so?
“Marley’s Ghost is the symbol of divine grace, and the three Christmas Spirits are the working of that grace through the agencies of memory, example, and fear. And Scrooge, although of course he is himself too, is himself not alone: he is the embodiment of all that concentration upon material power and callous indifference to the welfare of human beings that the economists had erected into a system, businessmen and industrialists pursued relentlessly, and society had taken for granted as inevitable and proper. The conversion of Scrooge is an image of the conversion for which Dickens hopes among mankind,” wrote Edgar Johnson.
“In A Christmas Carol Dickens imagines what he once was and what he might have become . . . he wanted to recreate the atmosphere of the fairy stories which he had read as a child; but one in which he was the real hero too,” wrote Peter Ackroyd.
“An intelligent boy!” said Scrooge. “A remarkable boy! Do you know whether they’ve sold the prize Turkey that was hanging up there?—Not the little prize Turkey: the big one?”
“What, the one as big as me?” returned the boy.
“What a delightful boy!” said Scrooge. “It’s a pleasure to talk to him. Yes, my buck!”
“It’s hanging there now,” replied the boy.
“Is it?” said Scrooge. “Go and buy it.”
Surely, Dickens did not invent the Christmas goose or turkey. Washington Irving had written about it years before, in a book Dickens knew well, entitled, Old Christmas, which related time he had spent in an old English castle, Aston Hall, on holiday season in 1820.
“Perhaps the impending holiday might have given a more than usual animation to the country, for it seemed to me as if everybody was in good looks and good spirits. Game, poultry, and other luxuries of the table were in brisk circulation in the villages; the grocers’, butchers’, and fruiterers’ shops were thronged with customers. The housewives were stirring briskly about, putting their dwellings in order, and the glossy branches of holly, with their bright red berries, began to appear at the windows. The scene brought to mind an old writer’s account of Christmas preparation: ‘Now capons and hens, besides turkeys, geese, and ducks, with beef and mutton—must all die; for in twelve days a multitude of people will not be fed with a little. Now plums and spice, sugar and honey, square it among pies and broth. Now or never must music be in tune, for the youth must dance and sing to get them a heat, while the aged sit by the fire. The country maid leaves half her market, and must be sent again, if she forgets a pack of cards on Christmas Eve. Great is the contention of Holly and Ivy, whether master or dame wears the breeches. Dice and cards benefit the butler; and if the cook do not lack wit, he will sweetly lick his fingers,’ ” wrote Irving.
But one question continued to vex some folks—was it a goose or a turkey that Scrooge should have bought?
“In fact, as everyone surely knew, Turkey was a North American fowl. Scrooge buying a turkey instead of a goose in London Town would be as improbable as a London clubman ordering bourbon and ginger ale instead of Scotch and soda,” wrote popular columnist Russell Baker.
However turkey was not unknown to Londoners by the mid-1800s. Turkey was most commonly referred to as “Indian chicken,” much like corn was called “Indian corn,” etc. Even the French referred to it as coq d’Inde. In Austria turkeys in common parlance were called simply “Indians.”
Turkey had been in Europe for some time. Most modern domesticated turkey is descended from one of six subspecies of wild turkey found in present day Mexico. Domestic turkeys were taken to Europe by the Spanish, which evolved into current popular breeds as Spanish Black and the Royal Palm. It is widely credited that the sixteenth-century English navigator William Strickland introduced the bird to the British Isles. English farmer Thomas Tusser noted the turkey being among farmers’ fare at Christmas in 1573. Prior to the late nineteenth century, turkey was something of a luxury in the United Kingdom, with goose or beef a more common Christmas dinner among the working classes.
There is no question, too, that Dickens had just returned from America, where turkey was a common meal, and was served especially on festive occasions. Dickens must surely have partaken of turkey during his stay, thus it found its way into the story.
Popular cookbooks of the time also call for turkey and goose. Here is how Mrs. Beeton, the most popular English cookbook author of the mid-nineteenth century, writes about the Christmas turkey in Mrs. Beeton’s Every Day Cookery and Housekeeping Book:
“A noble dish is a turkey, roast or boiled. A Christmas dinner, with the middle-class of this empire, would scarcely be a Christmas dinner without its turkey; and we can hardly imagine an object of greater envy than that presented by a respected portly paterfamilias carving, at the season devoted to good cheer and genial charity, his own fat turkey, and carving it well.”
“So, the turkey that Scrooge purchased—the huge bird that could ‘never could have stood upon his legs’—was a prize bird that hung in the poulterer’s window to draw people in. It wasn’t the only prize bird—there were two prize birds in the window—a little one and a big one. The prize birds were everyone’s dream, but they couldn’t afford to eat these dreams—on Christmas Day these visions of unlimited bounty were still unsold. What people actually served at home for the Christmas dinner were smaller turkeys—very likely the eight to twelve pounds implied by Mrs. Beeton’s recipe,” wrote William Rubel, a food historian.