25A014 Saving Ebenezer by Jim Davies, 4/8/2025

Few novels are more popular than Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, a story of life in mid-Victorian England featuring poverty and wealth. The villain of the piece is Ebenezer Scrooge, who is a rich miser. (Dickens had a wonderful ability to summarize the nature of his characters by naming them; what else could "Uriah Heap" be, but an obsequious and slippery deceiver?)

He's skilled in the stock exchange, and builds a tidy fortune; good for him. But he's miserable and mean; he pays his clerk Bob Cratchit as little as possible and donates nothing to anyone in need. Of Christmas, his famous summary is "Bah, Humbug!"

But he has a series of terrible nightmares, brought to him by the ghost of his late partner Jacob Marley; as a result of which he undergoes a radical reformation. He becomes a benefactor, taking great pleasure in giving away his fortune. And there the novel ends. Everyone lives happily ever after.

The late David Holmes noticed that logically, the story ought not to stop there. What happened next, to Ebenezer's boundless generosity? David wrote an extension: A Capitalist Carol, shortly before he died. It's briefly reviewed in a 2010 ZGBlog.

The question over-hanging Dickens' tale, and which David takes up, is: what happened when Ebenezer had nothing left to give?

Obviously, when he exhausts his fortune and neglects his investment business, Scrooge goes bust. He encounters creditors on every street corner, appoints the wholly unqualified Bob Cratchit to take care of the business, and eventually falls victim to The Magistrate, who deprives him (in mid-Victorian English Law) of everything he has, except his clothing and his Bible. He becomes destitute, and far from helping others he experiences what it's like to be a beggar. He is sad to discover that few are as generous as he had been a few weeks earlier. He is at his tether's end, and tries to kill himself - but fails. He's at his lowest ebb.

I could pick some nits with the way David Holmes does it, but in essence Ebenezer then falls back on the one other thing he owns: his mind. He sets aside his new faith in boundless generosity, and begins to reason. The outcome is a second conversion; not back to his former miserly self, but forward to a rational understanding. Without dreams and ghosts and clanking chains this time, he takes a long series of looks at which way is up.

He recalls that homo sapiens has come a very long way, from cave-dwelling hominids existing in squalor, to the luxurious world of feather beds, coal fires in warm houses, with ample food and drink and physicians close by with horse-drawn carriages to bring them. He wonders how that progress was achieved, and concludes it was by application of the mind rather than by supernatural influences such as made up the religious feelings he had recently adopted.

He gradually comes to understand, by further use of one of his few remaining assets - his brain - that humans had progressed by thinking about how to acquire good things like shelter, warmth, food etc. - that passive instinct could not have done the job. It had to have been the intelligent working out of answers to the question "how can I get more, for less?" and so, with his background on the stock exchange, concluded that capitalism had enabled man to do the job; that is, to apply some of what he had achieved so as to achieve more the next time around.

And no, real capitalism is not a zero sum game; for in free, voluntary exchanges both parties win. Otherwise, they would never take place.

It would be another century and a half before I wrote Denial of Liberty so Ebenezer could not have read that summary of how such progress was hindered by government in every era, so he didn't figure out why the advance hadn't taken place much faster; but he did deduce the essential point.

Having done so, in David Holmes' delightful final chapter Mr Scrooge realizes he can raise a little capital by selling his Bible (a first edition KJV) then use the proceeds to buy merchandise to sell at a profit, with the aid of a young lad who has seen the sales opportunity. He rewards the boy generously and recovers his life, now with a healthy measure of benevolence but also prospering as before.

A Capitalist Carol can be read from the Net using that link.