ABSTRACT
In December 1997 the pupils of Northwich School performed Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol as a show for their parents, teachers, and school governors. This is not an uncommon choice of school play and, no doubt, pupils in many other schools in England were, at the same time, also acting out this classic tale. A Christmas Carol is, in essence, a moral tale about the importance of generosity for the maintenance of social relations—generosity of spirit, pleasure, compassion, and money—but it is through the metaphorical play around the themes of time itself that the transformation of miserly, vicious Scrooge is achieved. The end of the play sees Scrooge rescued from the compulsions of his character through the literal embodiment of time past, present, and future. Via frightening, bodily encounters with the different ghosts of Christmas, Scrooge begins to see the part the passing of time and past experiences have played in the shaping of his own biography and, finally, he is shown a vision of the future that, if he does not mend his ways, will prove tragic. In sum, therefore, the moral causality of A Christmas Carol lies in its espousal of the Protestant Ethic—that “time is money”—linked to the demands of the biological clock—that “time is short”. Thus, the play acts as a reminder that social action is temporalized through its location in individual biographies and that, in this sense, its consequences reverberate across the life course through the lived, bodily experiences of individuals.
