Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol — a sentimental novella
about the redemption of a miser — could easily have turned to
drivel. Why didn’t it? Here’s an answer from the novelist Jane
Smiley: “A Christmas Carol, like Martin Chuzzlewit, concerns
itself with the social ramifications of selfishness, but the
characters of young Martin and old Martin are combined in that
of Ebenezer Scrooge, and his moral journey, which takes place in
three acts in one night, has the force of a revelation rather
than the tedium of a lengthy trek by ox-drawn wagon. Some of the
narrative had its origins in one of Dickens’s own vivid dreams,
and surely the idea of of using dreams as a structural device
had its origins there as well … “But what makes A Christmas
Carol work — what makes it so appealing a novella that William
Makepeace Thackeray, Dickens’s most self-conscious literary
rival, called it ‘a national benefit’ — is the lightness of
Dickens’s touch. Instead of hammering his points home, as he
does in Martin Chuzzlewit, he is