Making Modernity Magical: Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and the Reenchanted Chronotope

Abstract

In his 1843 novella A Christmas Carol Dickens takes the sensations usually associated with alienation and disenchantment in the nineteenth century and reappropriates their language and energy to reenchantment. We can therefore read A Christmas Carol not only as the conversion narrative of Scrooge from bad capitalist to good capitalist, as has been done many times, but also Dickens’ reckoning with the possibilities afforded by modern life and modernity as a narrative device in his turn to the biographical form. In essence, Dickens charts a move forward which allows the strangeness and uncanny sensations of modernity to explode out into webs of possibility made possible but not limited by the conventions of the realist novel.