It was clever of Dickens to make the man who hated Christmas rich,
because it gave his well-heeled audience an insult to sling at the poor
which could suggest parsimony, not poverty
(along with what that queer unBritish Christian name suggested)
if they dared complain about the cost of gifts and geese and mandatory
good cheer, and how that cost keeps rising every year.
It clothed their self-congratulation and their cruelty
in a jolly cloak of fellowship and charity, a reality he artfully
revealed to be the very centre of his story, surrounded by
a tactically-deployed sentimentality,
which licensed them to happily ignore it, as they tucked in
to their puddings and their poultry.
I don't mean to say that Dickens was a hypocrite:
simply that he knew what being poor really is; knew, too,
who had spare cash to buy the magazines he published in,
and gave them what they wanted: 'Scrooge' and 'humbug'
as a shorthand they could wield to penalise
anybody crotchety enough to spoil their fun,
to point out that their locked and bolted doors belied their cry,
port glasses raised: God bless us, every one.
