Ayn Rand's Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol

By Kurt Hartwig

In Charles Dickens’ 1843 classic A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge is transformed through the visits of one Ghost and three Spirits, and becomes a man who embodies the generosity and very spirit of Christmas. The story has been no less popular in our time, spawning theatrical and cinematic adaptations and reminding us, every December, what Christmas is about.

However, our nostalgia for the story itself has obscured what has changed within our culture. It is not Scrooge who should examine himself and his own actions, but that parasite upon society, Robert Cratchit. It is Scrooge who is today’s model citizen – frugal, hard-nosed, and independent of need.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kurt Hartwig
• Release date: Oct 28, 2012
• ISBN: 9780988373808

Book preview

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or, if borrowed from Dickens, used satirically.

Copyright @ 2012 by Walter Gerald.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.

Cover design by Kurt Hartwig.

Interior art by Brooklyn Henke.

Special thanks to Lisa Gildehaus and Michelle Lopez-Rios.

Smashwords edition 2012

This book is available in print at most online retailers.

Summary: A satirical take on Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol using the perspective of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism with Robert Cratchit being the man visited by the three ghosts of Christmas and Ebenezer Scrooge the model citizen.

ISBN 978-0-9883738-0-8 (electronic)

ISBN 978-1468121575 (print edition)

Table of Contents

Chapter One – Johns’ Ghost

Chapter Two – The First of the Three Spirits

Chapter Three – The Second of the Three Spirits

Chapter Four – The Last of the Spirits

Chapter Five – The End of It

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Johns was dead. There was no doubt about that. The death certificate was signed by the coroner and verified by the clerk of court. The registry at the burial bore witness to further signatures: the pastor, Johns’ family. Robert Cratchit signed it. And Cratchit’s signature was as good as his word. Poor David Johns was dead as dead can be.

Cratchit knew he was dead. Of course, he did. He had been Johns’ closest friend, business partner, executor, his beneficiary in equal parts to Johns’ own family, complete with Johns’ remaining shares in their company. There was no doubt in Cratchit’s mind that Johns was dead, a fact I cannot convey emphatically enough, or nothing can come of the story I am going to relate.

Johns never changed the name of the company when Cratchit left. It sat proudly on letterhead and business cards, on the spare, elegant website: JC Enterprises. Cratchit and Johns. Johns and Cratchit. They were two peas in a pod, generous to a fault, gregarious of spirit, joyous of nature. Warm weather and good cheer trailed in their wake. To change the name of the company would have been to betray a friendship.

Cratchit did not leave the company because he lacked devotion. Far from it. He left because his family requested it, desirous that he earn more, and more regularly, and for this Johns did not begrudge him in the slightest, evidenced by the generosity aforementioned in his last will and testament. This was the way of these two men, and all who passed them recognized it in their faces and in their natures.

In the year to the day from when Johns died, of all days on Christmas Eve, Robert Cratchit sat working away, now head accountant for the firm of Scrooge & Marley. It was cold, bleak, biting weather. Through the tinted glass windows he could see people walking in the streets below, beating their hands upon their breasts and stamping their feet