Affordable Housing Institute : US

Of all the movie and television versions of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (and there have been at least thirteen) my favorite is the Mr. Magoo one.  Perhaps because it debuted when I was only nine, it hit me with plenty of force — the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come an absolutely terrifying specter — and even today I can quote chunks of dialog or sing the songs (like “We’re Des-pick-able!”). 

 

 

“We’re rep-re-hensible!  We’ll steal your pen — and your pencible!.”

 

I’ve never actually read the story all the way through.  I find its prose turgid, melodramatic in the extreme, and overwrought with the floridity that comes from writing in a great speed and not later editing.  But in the movie versions (especially Magoo’s, which is blessedly short), we see clearly that in choosing this particular morality tale Dickens was targeting that special self-righteousness of the self-made skinflint, parodied as Gradgrind in David Copperfield and here as Ebenezer himself, brilliantly distilling the quintessential judgment of those who see the poor as a species apart, responsible for their own misfortune:

 

“At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge,” said the gentleman, taking up a pen, “it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.”

 

 

“Are there no prisons?” asked Scrooge.

 

“Plenty of prisons,” said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.

 

“And the Union workhouses?” demanded Scrooge.  “Are they still in operation?”

 

“They are. Still,” returned the gentleman, “I wish I could say they were not.”

 

“The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?” said Scrooge.

 

“Both very busy, sir.”

 

“Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course,” said Scrooge. “I’m very glad to hear it.”

 

“Under the impression that they scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude,” returned the gentleman, “a few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth. We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down for?”

 

“Nothing!” Scrooge replied.

 

 

“You wish to be anonymous?”

 

“I wish to be left alone,” said Scrooge. “Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer.  I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned–they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there.”

 

There it is, the Victorian (and earlier, Puritan) belief that man is born sinner, but has free choice, and if his circumstances are desperate, why it is his own character that has made it so.  It is enough that the state provide refuges; to make them pleasant would be only to reward shiftlessness.

 

(As I’ve written before on this blog, it’s common in early American and English towns to place the poor house, the work house, the prison and the lunatic asylum in close proximity to one another, for they are all moral failings and might as well be interchangeable.)

 

And what of the unfortunates who find themselves in such duress?

 

“Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”

 

“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.  Besides–excuse me–I don’t know that.”

 

For all his slapdash writing, Dickens was a shrewd judge of character.  Look at how, Scrooge having pronounced a sentence of excommunication and death upon the poor, he suddenly halts his peroration to question the assumptions.  And listen to the smooth way his interlocutor probes Scrooge’s desire for denial:

 

“But you might know it,” observed the gentleman.

 

“It’s not my business,” Scrooge returned. “It’s enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people’s. Mine occupies me constantly. Good afternoon, gentlemen!” 

 

“But you might know it.”  You might know that the poor are so not all because of their choice, some because of their misfortune.  And you might wish not to have to confront that your philosophy rests upon a refutable premise, a premise whose refutation, however, you have exempted yourself from — except in the moral world of an author who visits upon you the soul of your departed partner:

 

 

A Ghost who directly and remorselessly exposes Scrooge’s deliberately-buried hypocrisy:

 

“Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”

 

It held up its chain at arm’s length, as if that were the cause of all its unavailing grief, and flung it heavily upon the ground again.

 

The chain is one of ignorance, or blindness to those about us.

 

“At this time of the rolling year,” the spectre said, “I suffer most. Why did I walk through crowds of fellow-beings with my eyes turned down, and never raise them to that blessed Star which led the Wise Men to a poor abode! Were there no poor homes to which its light would have conducted me!”

 

Throughout the story runs the concept of home, the place of refuge, the nurturing of family.  Young Ebenzer himself has a cold and empty home:

 

Scrooge’s former self grew larger at the words, and the room became a little darker and more dirty. The panels shrunk, the windows cracked; fragments of plaster fell out of the ceiling, and the naked laths were shown instead; but how all this was brought about, Scrooge knew no more than you do. He only knew that it was quite correct; that everything had happened so; that there he was, alone again, when all the other boys had gone home for the jolly holidays.

 

Upbringing, Dickens says, makes character — and character visits its judgment upon the next generation, as Scrooge discovers when he is whisked to the Cratchits:

 

 

“I see a vacant seat,” replied the Ghost, “in the poor chimney-corner, and a crutch without an owner, carefully preserved. If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, the child will die.”

 

 

Even though the sanitation and epidemiological connections were not fully understood in Dickens’ time, the Ghosts brook no argument — a bad living environment breeds disease, and that breeds death:

 

“No, no,” said Scrooge. “Oh, no, kind Spirit! say he will be spared.”

 

“If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, none other of my race,” returned the Ghost, “will find him here. What then? If he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

 

As I’ve written elsewhere, in the abstract the poor are ‘those people’, somehow divorced from the humanity that unites the rest of us — until we confront them as individuals.  In like fashion, as Scrooge is reeling from this tragedy, he is shown his own, and that not only is he unmourned, in fact his passing is welcomed, and measured solely for its economic benefit, as the tangible goods he assembled in life are sold off, with much cackling, by those whom in life he has ignored:

 

 

“Before I draw nearer to that stone to which you point,” said Scrooge, “answer me one question. Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only?”

 

Still the Ghost pointed downward to the grave by which it stood.

 

 

“Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead,” said Scrooge. “But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me!”

 

The Spirit was immovable as ever.

 

Scrooge crept towards it, trembling as he went; and following the finger, read upon the stone of the neglected grave his own name, EBENEZER SCROOGE.

 

What, the Ghosts might have asked, is the purpose of money? 

 

·         In personal terms, it is a device to buy happiness — our own, or others’.

·         In economic terms, it is a tremendous invention, for it enables commence, enhances trade, and provides a quick and portable means of securing products and services of others. 

·         In societal terms, it is how we make it possible to care for the elderly, the infirm, the orphans, the troubled.  It lashes self-interest to social purpose and makes them both equal, both valuable.

·         In housing policy terms, it is how we give the world’s elderly, and the world’s children, better lives and hope of better lives.

 

What drives me about this maddening, fascinating, frustrating, complex business, what gets me to keep trying to improve the ecosystem, is that I cannot walk into a home, whether a hovel in Kibera or a small apartment amid a concrete public-housing high-rise, without immediately realizing that a person lives there, a person who has made some effort to make the place both personal and comfortable.

 

Mavoko slum, Nairobi, Kenya

 

Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did not die, he was a second father. He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world.  Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms. His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him.

 

 

God bless us, every one.

 

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