Belle Dumped Scrooge Because She Held Up Her End of the Bargain and He Didn’t.
Scrooge Wasn’t Greedy: He Feared the Debtors Prisons. A Tragic Love Story Defined By the Rise of the Petite Bourgeoisie in Late Industrial Revolution England
He Couldn’t Commit: Ebenezer and Belle, Looked Upon by Old Fozziweg in A Muppet Christmas Carol.
For me, one of Dickens’ best passages is Belle’s break-up with Ebenezer Scrooge. Read in its 1843 London context, the passage deepens Scrooge from just a greedy miser, his unwillingness to commit to Belle has a cold, hard logic that’s not irrational in its time and place. His greed grew out of fear of the very real consequences of social class in late Industrial Revolution England.
As for Belle, Dickens often struggled with female characters, especially dehumanizing angelic young women. But Belle’s short appearance in A Christmas Carol is one of the most fully realized women in all Dickens. Too often, on stage or in film, she is presented as a gentle, disappointed, sad presence–merely a vehicle for us to understand Ebenezer’s transformation into Scrooge.
In Dickens’ passage, however, Belle is a soulful force. Dickens spent time and effort creating her: In his original manuscript, he rewrites her parts, mostly by subtracting rather than elaborating, making her fewer words more powerful.
Dickens’ Original Handwritten Manuscript of Belle’s Break Up. He Really Did Rework It, Mostly Editing Down the Text to Make It Sting More.
To me, it seems likely that Dickens drew upon Hamlet, which he alludes to in the fourth paragraph of Carol for the proposition that Marley’s Ghost is, like Hamlet’s Father, really a ghost. For Belle, Dickens seems to draw on a different part of the play: Act I, Scene III, where Ophelia’s father Polonius warns her that Hamlet’s sweet words to her–his “tenders”--are nothing more than legal tender so that he can get what he wants. Hamlet may say he loves you, Ophelia, but:
Do not believe his vows, for they are brokers,
Not of that dye which their investments show,
But mere ⟨implorators⟩ of unholy suits,
Breathing like sanctified and pious ⌜bawds⌝
The better to ⟨beguile.⟩
This kind of transactional language is how Belle breaks up with Ebenezer. He has become too engrossed in making money, so she speaks to him in the only language he seems to understand: business and contracts.
The passage is worth reading in full, then we’ll put it in the context of 1840s London, at the rise of the professional, bourgeois class that Ebenezer and Belle are part of.
This was not addressed to Scrooge, or to any one whom he could see, but it produced an immediate effect. For again Scrooge saw himself. He was older now; a man in the prime of life. His face had not the harsh and rigid lines of later years; but it had begun to wear the signs of care and avarice. There was an eager, greedy, restless motion in the eye, which showed the passion that had taken root, and where the shadow of the growing tree would fall.
He was not alone, but sat by the side of a fair young girl in a mourning-dress: in whose eyes there were tears, which sparkled in the light that shone out of the Ghost of Christmas Past.
“It matters little,” she said, softly. “To you, very little. Another idol has displaced me; and if it can cheer and comfort you in time to come, as I would have tried to do, I have no just cause to grieve.”
“What Idol has displaced you?” he rejoined.
“A golden one.”
“This is the even-handed dealing of the world!” he said. “There is nothing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!”
“You fear the world too much,” she answered, gently. “All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach. I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one by one, until the master-passion, Gain, engrosses you. Have I not?”
“What then?” he retorted. “Even if I have grown so much wiser, what then? I am not changed towards you.”
She shook her head.
“Am I?”
“Our contract is an old one. It was made when we were both poor and content to be so, until, in good season, we could improve our worldly fortune by our patient industry. You are changed. When it was made, you were another man.”
“I was a boy,” he said impatiently.
“Your own feeling tells you that you were not what you are,” she returned. “I am. That which promised happiness when we were one in heart, is fraught with misery now that we are two. How often and how keenly I have thought of this, I will not say. It is enough that I have thought of it, and can release you.”
“Have I ever sought release?”
“In words. No. Never.”
“In what, then?”
“In a changed nature; in an altered spirit; in another atmosphere of life; another Hope as its great end. In everything that made my love of any worth or value in your sight. If this had never been between us,” said the girl, looking mildly, but with steadiness, upon him; “tell me, would you seek me out and try to win me now? Ah, no!”
He seemed to yield to the justice of this supposition, in spite of himself. But he said with a struggle, “You think not.”
“I would gladly think otherwise if I could,” she answered, “Heaven knows! When I have learned a Truth like this, I know how strong and irresistible it must be. But if you were free to-day, to-morrow, yesterday, can even I believe that you would choose a dowerless girl—you who, in your very confidence with her, weigh everything by Gain: or, choosing her, if for a moment you were false enough to your one guiding principle to do so, do I not know that your repentance and regret would surely follow? I do; and I release you. With a full heart, for the love of him you once were.”
He was about to speak; but with her head turned from him, she resumed.
“You may—the memory of what is past half makes me hope you will—have pain in this. A very, very brief time, and you will dismiss the recollection of it, gladly, as an unprofitable dream, from which it happened well that you awoke. May you be happy in the life you have chosen!”
She left him, and they parted.
How did they get to this point?
The 1840s were towards the end of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, so the social stratification caused by the misery of urban factory work had entrenched a deep divide between the working class and the middle class. Belle and Ebenezer were trying to work their way into the petite bourgeoisie, the social class of educated professionals that grew rapidly during the Industrial Revolution.
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