A Christmas Carol or "To Give and Not to Count the Cost........."

 

At the beginning of 1858 Charles Dickens became President of the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital Appeal and on February 9th of that year he read his great book “A Christmas Carol” to an assembled audience of social reformers and potential donors. Before the reading he gave what is often regarded as one of his greatest and most powerful speeches about the social conditions of his time. The whole, very long, speech is recorded The Nursing Record of that time. In it he told of an experience he had had whilst on one of his many – almost nightly - walks around London’s poorest areas. Dickens frequently walked the streets of London at night – on his walks he got ideas for many of his plots, his characters (in books such as Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby and, of course, A Christmas Carol) and to fuel his vivid descriptions of the great city of Victorian London. Dickens described in that speech to his audience of a powerful and telling scene that he had witnessed on one of his walks:

“There  lay, in an  old egg-box, which the  mother had  begged  from a shop, a little feeble, wasted,  wan,  sick  child.  With  his  little  wasted face,  and  his  little  hot  worn  hands folded over  his breast,  and  his little  bright  attentive  eyes,  I  can see him  now looking  steadily  at  us.  There  he  lay in  his  little frail box,  which was not at all a bad  emblem of the little body,  from  which  he  was  slowly  parting, - there  he lay  quite  quiet,  quite  patient,  saying  never a word.  He  seldom cried,  the  mother  said;  he seldom  complained;  he  lay  there  seeming  to  wonder what it  was about.  “God  knows” I thought, as I stood  looking  at  him,  he  had  his  reasons  for wondering - how  it  could possibly come  to  be  that  he  lay there,  left  alone, feeble  and full of pain. There  he  lay  looking  at us, saying  in  his   silence,  more  pathetically  than  I have ever  heard  anything  said by  any  orator in alI my  life,  “Will  you please  to  tell  me  what  this means,  strange  man?  and  if  you  can  give me any good  reason  why  I should  be  so  soon  so   far advanced  upon  my  way  to  Him  who  said that children  were  to  come  into  His presence,  and were not to  be  forbidden,  but  who  scarcely  meant,  I think,  that  they should  come  by  this  hard  road by which I am  travelling..........”

Great Ormond Street Hospital  was established in 1852 after a long campaign by Dr Charles West, a personal friend of Dickens, with just 10 beds and on that night when Dickens spoke to the little group of potential donors he read to his audience “A Christmas Carol”. This was not an idle or little thought about choice – Dickens was no fool and on this matter he was both angry and determined to make people think so he chose his great Christmas tale to point a finger at the excesses of the City and at the gradgrind world of the  accountant and selfish  Scrooge-like  figures that haunted it. But, he also knew that people mattered when it came to care and compassion and so in telling the story of the baby in the egg box he was unapologetically pricking consciences and appealing to ordinary people to pay up, to be responsible for the health and welfare of their fellow men. Together, the two stories were intended to plant a moral question into the minds of his audience and to ask them to shoulder the responsibility – not hand it on to some management accountant or venture capitalist or private equity company. In short – and as Dickens posed the question first set out in the Book of Genesis - to his audience: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

At the end of his reading of "A Christmas Carol" Dickens appealed directly to his audience and put the ball squarely in their court:   " Now, ladies  and  gentlemen,  such  things [the sick child in the egg box] need not be,  and will  not be,  if  this  company,  which  is  a  drop of the life-blood of the  great compassionate public  heart,  will  only accept the means of rescue and  prevention  which it is mine to offer and make a donation to this worthy cause and if every grateful mother who brings a child  to the hospital  will  drop a  penny  into a box placed on the wall of the hospital,  the  Hospital  funds  may  possibly  be increased  in  a year by so large a  sum  as  forty pounds. I will  not believe that  in  a Christian  community  of  fathers  and  mothers,  and brothers  and sisters, the hospital can fail to  be  well and  richly  endowed".   

As Dickens concluded the records tell us, that there were great cheers from the audience.  It worked - the appeal was very successful. Dickens acknowledged , it was a small drop on the ocean – he was originally looking for only thirty beds (an increase on the 10 beds that the hospital had started its life) but by 1865 there were 75 beds available.  It was very small stuff with which to tackle the giant health and social problems of the time; the hospital had to depend upon the goodwill of well wishers and patrons - but work it did. People put their hands in their pockets, not necessarily for themselves but for their fellow man and woman – Great Ormond Street Hospital was born. Today, of course, Great Ormond Street is one of the great hospitals of the world, one of the "jewels in the crown" of our nation, but it was born of a small acts of giving from well intentioned but ordinary people.

I wonder, today, as 2020 nears its end and when Dickens’ great Christmas tale is in many minds, what the author would say of a country that almost 200 years after he wrote his great works and despite being one of the richest nations the planet has ever seen still needs food banks, campaigns from high profile people like Marcus Rashford, and hand outs from international agencies such as UNICEF to feed its poorest. I wonder, too, what Dickens would write of the wealth and excess that typifies the City of London and many of those (like Jacob Reece-Mogg) who benefit from its wealth and excess or work in its gilded towers when contrasted with the lot of people who live in places like Southwark – within walking distance of that great financial centre – and other similar deprived areas throughout the land? Almost two centuries have passed since Dickens took his midnight walks through the gas lit streets of Victorian London where beggars, poverty stricken children and ill health amongst the poor was common place. Sadly, however, as the report by Sir Michael Marmot “Fair Society, Healthy Lives” published last week showed with frightening clarity, little has really changed for many in those two centuries. I think that our current discontents would have depressed and angered the great writer – as would the facile and offensive comments by Reece-Mogg, who is himself one of the great beneficiaries of the wealth, excess and accountancy world of the City of London. It would also have offended Dickens to hear that a well respected world institution like UNICEF in trying to help the most needy in society, was condemned by a receiver of great wealth, as just “playing politics.”

And there is another point which in many ways is the most telling – both of Dickens’ efforts to raise money for the fledgling  hospital and the reaction of Reece-Mogg to the UNICEF act of giving in 2020. It is this; The Nursing Record of February 1858 in recording the events of that night when Dickens appealed for donations ended its report with these words: “.....the ladies and gentlemen of the audience afforded Mr Dickens great and rousing cheers as donations and endowments were pledged....”. Clearly they were applauding the man and his great story and his appeal but were they not also applauding something else – namely the very act of giving? When these wealthy Victorians had pledged and donated did they not simply feel good about it and a little more human – so they cheered and applauded. That is true of most of us – when we give it makes us feel better about ourselves, we feel that we are making a contribution to someone’s happiness – be it a birthday or Christmas gift to a friend or relation or a donation to a favourite charity - the result is the same. The act of giving to someone else gives us some kind of personal dignity and a feeling that we have contributed to the community, to the greater good, to the common good. We might be cynical and say that if Bill Gates donates millions to some cause he is merely easing his tax burden  - and it might be argued that he is – but that does not alter the fact he can still feel good about his actions, he has made a difference to the life of someone else. From my perspective if that is, to use Mogg's words "playing politics" then I say bring it on"! It is a basic aspect of the human condition that most of us wish to feel good about ourselves, to have a high level of personal esteem, to feel that others look up to us – and when those feelings are not there it can impact upon our mental health – it is the consequence of being a social animal. So it is no surprise that those long gone Victorians cheered and applauded when they had done their good deed – had we been in that room we would have probably done the same – and given ourselves a pat on the back and thought how virtuous we were. It’s called being human.

Sadly, however, Jacob Reece-Mogg, the MP for North East Somerset and bizarrely the man appointed by our present PM as the Leader of the House of Commons has no such humanitarian feelings. Presumably had he been in that room that night in 1858 he would have left before the end muttering about Dickens being some kind of “leftie anarchist playing politics”. He would have kept his hand firmly on his wallet, unmoved by the pictures that Dickens painted of life for the poor in what, at that time, was the greatest and wealthiest city on the planet. It is a damning and moral indictment on Mogg who is a devout Roman Catholic,  that this Scrooge like millionaire is so scathing on those who seek to help the poor – UNICEF, Marcus Rashford and others – when one of the great prayers of the Church – and especially the Roman Catholic Church - is that of St Ignatius of Loyola; a prayer which reminds us all of our personal and Christian responsibilities, and the moral imperatives which ought to guide our actions as human beings – especially in the act of giving:

"Teach me good Lord to serve thee as thou deservest
To give and not to count the cost,
To fight and not to heed the wounds,
To toil and not to seek for rest,
To labour and not to ask for reward
Save that of knowing I do Thy Will"