Understanding Scrooge.

There’s a line in A Christmas Carol, near the beginning when Scrooge is giving the charity collectors all the ‘let them die and reduce the surplus population’ stuff. At one point he checks himself and says ‘Excuse me, I don’t know that.’ I’ve never yet seen a dramatised adaptation of the book which has included that line. They all leave it out, and it isn’t surprising. It’s a moment of vulnerability, the one hint Dickens gives that the pre-enlightened Scrooge isn’t the out and out villain that modern audiences want to see. They want to see a bad man made good by the agents of correction – the Spirits – who punish him by showing him things that make him uncomfortable.

It doesn’t wash, does it? An out and out villain wouldn’t care about the things the Spirits show him. But Scrooge isn’t bad; he just behaves badly. The first thing the Spirits show us is the little boy left alone at school over Christmas because his father doesn’t want him. So now we know that the child Scrooge had been starved of affection to such an extent that he has understandably constructed a hard shell of cynicism and ruthlessness for self protection. The Spirits aren’t agents of correction at all, but agents of regression therapy. Scrooge has been a good guy all along. He just needed to be helped to find himself again.

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And a footnote, if I may:

The time I spent working for the Prison Department and an inner city charity showed me that punishment doesn’t turn truly bad people into good people. In fact, it usually makes them worse. Truly bad people don’t understand why their badness is bad, and so they don’t make the connection between the badness and the punishment. The only thing punishment does is make them even more angry against those inflicting the treatment, because they see such people or instruments as abusers. It might serve the purpose of revenge, and it might act as a deterrent in a few cases, but it doesn’t make bad people good.