THE TURN OF THE SCROOGE

First published on 19^th December 1843, ‘A Christmas Carol ’ not only revived Charles Dickens’ fortunes, but also that of Christmas itself. We take a seasonal peek at how memories restored, restored the Festive Spirit...

Every Christmas The Gentlemen, a motley crew of friends bearing scant similarity with Dickens’ Pickwick Club (or the Netflix series) gather at The Round Table Pub in St Martin’s Court, a key nexus of the West End Chapter of The Business of Pleasure.

And this year, as every year, one of The Gents posed questions (over pints) designed to illicit key events, learnings or reflections on the year passed …or wishes, thoughts and speculations for the year to come.

Being greedy by nature, when it came to my time to share this year I went for a two-hander, the first being something along the lines of:

“One of the biggest things for me personally this year has been regaining access to memories, and material, that hasn’t seen the light of day (consciousness) for decades.”

Which might not sound like a sure-fire starting point for a best-selling novella, but it may well have been on another winter's night, just down the road at The Marquis, on Chandos Place, where a youngish (for these days) writer stared down into his glass of punch (the historical precursor to the cocktail) and saw a storyline rising from the spices, sugar and… Spirits!

That would have been the particularly chilly winter of 1843, and Charles Dickens, then 31, with six children to feed, desparately needed to earn a few bob.  Sales for his last book, Martin Chuzzlewit were way below projection (great expectations?) and Chez Dickens was set to be a very unhappy place (bleak house?) for the coming festive season unless Charlie could somehow turn in an instant bestseller (no pressure there then).

On your marks!

On the 5^th of October, 1843, Dickens gave a remarkable speech in Manchester on the themes of poverty (which Dickens remembered only too sharply from his own childhood) and social responsibility.  While in Manchester, Dickens also visited his sister, and his tubercular nephew, Henry Burnett, who would become the inspiration for ‘Tiny Tim.’

Dickens initial idea for a Christmas cash injection was to pen a biting indictment of English society, but fortunately for us in The Business of Pleasure, something else was suffering in those times… Christmas itself.

Or as Dickens himself described it a few years previous in The Pickwick Papers, ‘Old Christmas ..had gradually been falling into disuse.’

So instead a turning in a head-battering moral pamphlet (which would probably have earned him sixpence) on the 19^th of December Dickens published, at his own cost, a lavishly produced novella which not only encapsulated contemporary apathy for the conditions of the poor…

SCROOGE: “Do they not have prisons and workhouses?”

...But also succeeded majestically in reviving Christmas as a popular public festival which united all classes in the spirit of Christian (or at least neighbourly) fellowship...

Whilst crucially, for us in The Business of Pleasure, spawning between 150 and 400 films and TV series, and more theatrical adaptations than I’ve had hot dinners (or consumed staged theatrical ‘turkeys’).

All six thousand copies of that first imprint of ‘A Christmas Carol ’ sold out in just five days (151 years before Amazon) and just in time for Christmas Day, when chapters of the book would be read aloud to the entire household (103 years before ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’ and 154 years before Netflix).

And it fair to say that Christmas also made a bit a comeback as a result of Dickens six week scramble at the writing desk (last year total global online sales for Xmas topped $1.2 trillion, with US holiday retail sales alone contributing circa $994 billion).

In 'A Christmas Carol,' The Spirit of Christmas Past works his magic by retrieving data from Scrooge’s cognitive Recycle Bin:

Scrooge can once again remember being alone at school when all the other boys have gone home for Christmas;

He can once again recall his former employer, Fezziwig, and the joyous Christmas celebrations among the staff and apprentices;

Crucially, he can now bring to mind the turning-point which set him on the path of misanthropic miserhood, his break up with Belle, his former fiancée.

But why the Dickens did Scrooge 'forget' all that important material in the first place?

Our ability to consign memories to the deep freeze, and subsequently lose the key, must have given Homo Sapiens an adaptive advantage somewhere down the evolutionary road; either as a general data-dump, to free up cognitive resources, and/or a repository for disturbing material.

Or, as Streisand would put it:

“Memories

May be beautiful and yet

What’s too painful to remember

We simply choose to forget.”

But there is a bit more to it (sorry Babs) as one research team hypothesised back in 2015*

‘Remembering does not merely reawaken memories of the past; it has a ‘darker’ side that induces forgetting of other experiences that interfere with retrieval, dynamically altering which aspects of the past remain accessible. Remembering, quite simply, causes forgetting. It has been hypothesised that this adaptive forgetting mechanism is caused by an inhibitory control mechanism that suppresses distraction from competing memories…’

Adding: 

 ‘…By showing a relationship between prefrontal activity and competitor suppression, our findings reinforce theoretical parallels between the mechanisms the brain uses to resolve mnemonic competition on the one hand, and sensory competition on the other hand, building a theoretical bridge spanning attention and long term memory. …More broadly, this work converges with a growing literature showing that forgetting often serves as an adaptive function; it establishes how, by simply using our memory system via selective retrieval, we adapt the landscape of memory to the demands of mental life.’

Or, as a later paper,** by a team looking into memory in mammals, not just humans, concludes:

‘Over the past several decades, neurobiological research on memory has focussed on mechanisms underlying memory storage. The current work underscores, however, that the mnemonic fate of an experience is not determined solely by its encoding or consolation, or by passive loss of plasticity; rather, it is governed by how organisms interact with memories to support behavioural goals. Here we establish adaptive forgetting as one powerful consequence of this interaction. We found that an evolutionarily selected motivated behaviour, the drive to explore novel environmental features, entrained episodic retrieval in service of behavioural control, and, in doing so, tethered the shaping of mnemonic ecosystems to organisms’ adaptive needs. The striking size, consistency, and durability of this effect, its generality across species, and its characteristics suggest a foundational process… that likely prevailed throughout the evolutionary history of memory – a ‘mental power’ possessing enough value to be conserved across mammalian species.’

The thing about Christmas…

In the best traditions of Dickens, this year, as every year, the Music and Theatre, TV and Cinema Chapters of The Business of Pleasure will be pulling out all the stops to evoke the Spirit of Christmas Past in each of us, no matter how selectively we strive to edit the memories resurrected…

 “Can it be that it was all so simple then?

Or has time rewritten every line?”

Well, we'll never know for sure Babs, but...

As I mentioned, when questioned, sitting outside The Round Table, in the great good company of The Gentlemen, finding the key to unlocking some important buried memories, was, I felt, one of my biggest personal accomplishments in 2025. 

And it doesn’t take the ghost of Dickens' Jacob Marley to open the doors.

Writing 70 years after A Christmas Carol, the French Chapter of The Business of Pleasure (M. Proust, 102 Boulevard Haussmann, Paris) recommended a small sponge cake for those In Search Of Lost Time.

But you know what, a mince pie and a glass of mulled wine can work just as well.

Merry Christmas to one and all!

DT 19 December 2025

 *Retrieval Induces Adaptive Forgetting of Competing Memories via Cortical Pattern Suppression, Maria Wimber, Arjen ALink, Ian Charest, Nikolaus Kriegeskorte, Michael Anderson, Nature Neuroscience, 2015

**A retrieval-specific mechanism of adaptive forgetting in the mammalian brain, Pedro Bekinschstein, Noelia V. Weisstaub, Francisco Gallo, Marrai Renner and Michael C. Anderson, Nature Communications, 7 November 2018.