Note: the following article on religion in A Christmas Carol is a modified excerpt (pp. 112-115) from my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which can be downloaded (for free) from the repository of the Tampere University Press. For a list of my other academic publications, see here.
You can also find an article about religion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
Religion in A Christmas Carol: a remarkably Secular Affair
Although religion in A Christmas Carol is mostly absent, the text still creates a framework of otherness based on Scrooge’s background and, in particular, his possible Jewishness. His occupation as a moneylender and the fact that he does not celebrate Christmas would have been obvious characteristic markers of Jewish origins for that time. Such stereotypes were not uncommon in Dickens’s works at large.
In Oliver Twist, the character of Fagin is referred to as “the Jew” almost three hundred times and the novel abounds in descriptions “that directly link him to Judas Iscariot and even Satan” (Muller 2003, xxvii), with connotations of the classic depiction of the Wandering Jew also present (Felsenstein 1995, 241). The process of shifting from a racially motivated wariness – if not outright hostility – to an absolution has been suggested to exist within Dickens’s works, although not without controversy, as Grossman argues:
(more…)[T]his understanding of Dickens’ Jews elides how Dickens’ narrators engage the problem of narrating this racial and religious other. This elision has most obviously resulted in an institutionalized disregard for Dickens’ final 1867 revision of Oliver Twist, in which he only selectively deleted the term “the Jew”. (1996, 37; emphasis in the original)
