THE RAREST OF ALL BIRDS

Today is the first day of winter. I can understand why the ancients celebrated this as a holiday: The sun was coming back! A friend and I were counting down to  this.

Anyway, here’s your post:
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A Christmas Carol: In Prose Being a Ghost Story of Christmas by Charles Dickens, 1843

They stood in the city streets on Christmas morning, where (for the weather was severe) 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, whence it was made delight to the boys to see it come plumping down into the road below, and splitting into artificial little snow-storms.

Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Present visit a part of town that seems idyllic in this scene, but it’s contrasted by the next paragraph.

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The house fronts looked black enough, and the windows blacker, contrasting with the smooth white sheet of snow upon the roofs, and with the dirtier snow upon the ground; which last deposit had been ploughed up in deep furrows by the heavy wheels of carts and waggons; furrows that . . . made intricate channels, hard to trace in the thick yellow mud and icy water. The sky was gloomy, and the shortest streets were choked up with a dingy mist, half thawed, half frozen, whose heavier particles descended in a shower of sooty atoms.

The squalor of the area contrasts sharply with the cheerful attitude of its inhabitants.

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There were ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish Onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish Friars, and winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe.

This is but one of many descriptions of the wares available at the fruiterer. It’s great personification and shows the depth of Dickens’s powers of observation.
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Then up rose Mrs. Cratchit, Cratchit’s wife, dressed out but poorly in a twice-turned gown, but brave in ribbons, which are cheap and make a goodly show for six-pence.

This one sentence shows the poverty and the cheerfulness of the Cratchit family.

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[Peter Cratchit] blew the fire, until the slow potatoes bubbling up, knocked loudly at the sauce-pan-lid to be let out and peeled.

More personification, this time of a dinner staple.
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“Somehow he gets thoughtful, sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.”

Bob Cratchit comments on Tiny Tim’s faith and attitude.

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Such a bustle ensued that you might have thought a goose the rarest of all birds; a feathered phenomenon, to which a black swan was a matter of course—and in truth it was something very like it in that house.

Again, Dickens shows us poverty rather than telling it.
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They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.

The Ghost of Christmas Present introduces these children as Ignorance and Want to an appalled Scrooge. This is the heart of the Dickens tale, which originally was supposed to be an essay called an “Appeal To The People Of England on behalf of the Poor Man’s Child.” I’m so glad he decided to express his concern in fiction form.
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There’s more to come, so stay tuned. I’ll be back on Friday