There it lies in front of you: the original of the greatest of all Christmas tales. You can see the bold, confident handwriting of the author. You can see the looping scrawls he used to delete phrases or words or lines. Squint, and you can see his inserts between lines, his clarifying phrases, the additions or deletions he made to build the rhythms of his sentences. Gazing at the page on display, you can see Dickens at work. You can feel his presence. You can feel Scrooge and Bob Cratchit and the ghosts, too.

When Dickens wrote "A Christmas Carol" he was 31. He was in the seventh year of the immense fame that came to him with "The Pickwick Papers." But that year, his serialized novel, "Martin Chuzzlewit," was not doing well with readers. He was living, as do all successful young men, above his means. He desperately needed a hit.

And while Dickens was writing all day to complete the "Chuzzlewit" serial, the tale of Ebenezer Scrooge began coming to him during his long nightly walks through gaslit London. In October 1843, he began to write the 65 pages that made up "A Christmas Carol." The work took six weeks. He finished in a state of exhaustion.

The story was published as a small book in time for Christmas, and in the glass case at the Morgan Library is a copy of the completed first edition. The left-hand page is a hand-colored drawing of Mr. Fezziwig's party by John Leech. On the right is the full title in blue and red ink: "A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas."

Dickens' tale was what we'd now call a smash hit, and in the 159 years that have passed since that glittering Christmas publication, it has never been out of print. A million other books have come and gone. Today, in this season, Ebenezer Scrooge still lives. The tale has been translated into most of the languages of the world, been made into movies (the best of which, for me, remains the 1951 Alastair Sim film), into stage plays, musicals, comic books. The word "scrooge" has long been part of the English language, a synonym for miser.

And the reason remains clear. Through the power of his high art, Dickens tapped into a universal hope: that human beings can change their often dreadful ways.

The form he chose for his moral tale is what today would be called magical realism, describing events rooted in the real world that are carried to another level through the power of imagination. It was no accident that Dickens, all his life, loved to perform magic tricks. But the magic of his Christmas story was more than literary sleight of hand.

When he was a boy, Dickens cherished "The Arabian Nights," and in his famous Christmas tale there is a buried reference to Ali Baba, and a long sequence, high above the world, that is the equivalent of a ride on a flying carpet. In all the years of his career, which began as a newspaper reporter at 16, he was himself a kind of Scheherazade, who, of course, told stories in order to live.

Painful childhood

The human power of the tale comes from Dickens' personal history. He is, in a crucial way, the great prose poet of childhood. More than all other 19th century novelists, he understands childhood injuries. Crippled Tiny Tim stands for all other kinds of early wounds, including those of his creator.

When Dickens was a bright, exuberant 12-year-old, his world was smashed. His father was hauled away to the Marshalsea Prison for failure to pay his debts. The family's possessions — including the boy's small library — were carried to the pawnshop. School was forgotten. And soon young Charles was working at a rat-infested factory called Warren's Blacking House, filling and labeling bottles of shoe polish. This didn't last a long time — the wastrel father received a small inheritance and got out of the debtors prison. But as critic Edmund Wilson has written: "For an imaginative and active boy of 12, six months of despair are quite enough."

The boy from the blacking factory, who visited his family each day in the prison, is still angry in "A Christmas Carol." He's Tiny Tim. But he's also Ebenezer Scrooge, the man he might have become. When two reformers (today called do-gooders), visit Scrooge to ask for donations for the poor, the mean old man answers: "Are there no prisons?" He then asks to know whether the workhouses are still in operation, is told they are, and Scrooge says: "I'm very glad to hear it." The reformers say that many would rather die than go to the workhouses.

"If they would rather die," says Scrooge, "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."

That is the Ebenezer Scrooge we see at the outset. Dickens describes him:

"Scrooge! A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret and self-contained and solitary as an oyster."

This is great stuff (Dickens obviously was no minimalist). But as Scrooge begins his long night, Dickens takes us on a very original journey. In an era of conventional Christian pieties, he virtually eliminates any obvious Christian message from his Christmas tale. Scrooge is not transported to some stable in Bethlehem; long before the advent of Herr Dr. Freud, he journeys into the hidden places of the self.

In some ways, this secular choice is no surprise either. Dickens was raised in a vaguely Anglican way, but as an adult he distrusted all organized religions. They were too full of pious hypocrisies, too prone to fanaticism. And so his three nocturnal visitors — the ageless Ghost of Christmas Past, the jolly giant called the Ghost of Christmas Present, the faceless Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come — resemble pagan deities more than Christian saints.

They force Scrooge to admit to the emotional injuries he himself had endured as a child, and the way, callused with bitter psychic scars, he has inflicted similar injuries on others. The ghosts don't offer visions of paradise or utopia. They show Scrooge the simplicities of family, human warmth, food and generosity and true communion, music and dancing and laughter, along with the dignity of a decent week's pay.

And, as always, Dickens, the secular liberal, the champion of education, comes back to children. At one point, the Ghost of Christmas Present unfurls his gown, and beneath it are huddled a boy and a girl, "yellow, meager, ragged, scowling, wolfish. ..." They are, the ghost says, the Children of Man.

"This boy is Ignorance," the ghost says. "This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom. ..."

Today, 159 years later, that boy and girl still live in the bad parts of all the cities of the world, including our own. Dickens, writing on these sheets of paper now displayed in New York, saw them plain. We continue to ignore them at our peril.

The Morgan Library is at 29 E. 36th St. Closed Mondays. If you want to see that part of this institution that was J. Pierpont Morgan's extraordinary library, go now. It will close for a year of renovation at the end of 2002. This is where Coalhouse Walker made his stand in E.L. Doctorow's fine novel "Ragtime."

Originally published on December 24, 2002