Perhaps the only Christmas story as famous as the Nativity itself is Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

Published on December 19th, 1843, its first edition contained this Preface by the author:

I have endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it.

Their faithful Friend and Servant,
C. D.

Dickens’ ‘Ghost of an Idea’ is spectral in itself, but seems to be stated by Scrooge’s nephew Fred, who declares to his miserly uncle that Christmas is ‘a good time’, when ‘men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave.’

The opening of Scrooge’s heart to the world is the crux of this classic tale, which according to author Christopher Booker portrays the story of ‘Rebirth’, one of The Seven Basic Plots, or narrative archetypes, which recur throughout all of storytelling.

Comprising such classic fairy tales as Sleeping Beauty and The Snow Queen, and such nineteenth-century novels as Crime and Punishment and Silas Marner, the ‘Rebirth’ plot involves a hero or heroine, trapped under a spell ‘in some wintry state akin to a living death. […] Then a miraculous act of redemption takes place, focused on a particular figure who helps to liberate the hero or heroine from imprisonment. From the depths of darkness they are brought up into glorious light.’

As Booker explains, in A Christmas Carol, ‘the central redeeming figure’ is Tiny Tim, whose crippled body and ‘childish essence’—and whose death, foreshadowed by the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come—move Scrooge to shake his frozen state.

Challenging British social attitudes towards poverty, Dickens portrays Scrooge reborn, showering the world with generosity and goodwill—‘a second father’ to Tiny Tim and ‘as good a friend, as good a master and as good a man as the old City knew.’

Such, one might venture to say, is ‘the Ghost of an Idea’ Dickens meant to inspire: that mankind, once mired in greed and darkness, might live out the greatest of stories: its own redemption and rebirth into goodness, love and light.