The Victorian age has long been considered a time of disenchantment. Beginning with Max Weber's seminal “Science as a Vocation,” secularization theory has argued that belief within modernity is marked by “rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world’” (155). In this account, modernization makes the “enchanted” world fall apart, changing it from a realm of “mysterious incalculable forces” into an empty space governed by nothing more than “technical means and calculations” (139). Religion, this narrative claims, inevitably fades away. It may attempt to survive disenchantment by downplaying its supernatural roots, but this rationalized religion nevertheless gives way to secularism. And although recent scholarship has challenged the assertion that the Victorian age simply marked the decline of faith, the disenchantment narrative remains a powerful one; even critics who dispute aspects of the theory acknowledge its force. Colin Jager's The Book of God, for instance, describes Weber's narrative of disenchantment as “a powerful account of the way in which science gradually demystifies the universe” (18), and George Levine's Darwin Loves You concedes that Weber's work, whatever its flaws, survives because it was “fashioned so powerfully and convincingly” (xiv).

The disenchantment thesis has thus remained influential for good reasons; its concepts of enchantment, rationality, and secularism have proven invaluable. But this influence comes at a steep price. It insists on seeing nothing but religious decline, when, as Charles LaPorte has argued, Victorian religious beliefs were “much more than the withered remains of a bygone age” (2). More problematically, the disenchantment thesis reduces a variety of religious positions to a simple binary – enchanted religion or disenchanted secularism – with a third possibility, rationalized religion, nothing more than the last stop before full-fledged agnosticism. But two formidable arguments have recently challenged this theory of disenchantment. The first disputes Weber's claim that modernity invariably leads to disenchanted secularism. Charles Taylor, most influentially, has argued that disenchantment need not mean “the end of religion” (553), pointing to ways religious faith can survive within a secular age. Meanwhile, a second approach explores the forms of enchantment that linger within secularism itself. Major versions of this line of thought include Levine's claim that Darwin offers a form of “nontheistic enchantment” (33), Jane Bennett's work showing how enchantment lives on in a “state of wonder” that can “inspire deep and powerful attachments” (4), and Akeel Bilgrami's insistence on a “version of enchantment” that emerges from “values in the world external to us” (156). These projects, focusing on the ways in which a rationalized world can be said to have agency or affective power, challenge Weber's narrative by discovering forms of secular enchantment.

Modernity, then, is not simply an age of doubt. It is instead a complex moment when belief, skepticism, enchantment, and disenchantment all thrive, with two positions that orthodox secularization theory overlooks or dismisses: disenchanted religion and enchanted secularism. And one of the best portraits of religion in modernity can be found not in social theory but in fiction: Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol (1843) shows how these religious positions coexist, reminding us how each could appear compelling in turn. As readers have long recognized, Dickens offers a disenchanted and humanistic Christianity, one that preserves a vague belief in the supernatural but stresses humanistic ethics. In this way, A Christmas Carol echoes the views of its creator, a believer in a largely rationalized, deliberately vague Christianity. But alongside this Christian humanism is something stranger and less noticed: a variety of secular enchantment along the lines described by Bilgrami and Bennett. Thus, while vestiges of disenchanted Christianity appear in A Christmas Carol, the text also offers a perspective that secularization theory ignores: a non-religious account of Christmas set within a deeply enchanted world. This seemingly contradictory perspective emerges through a literary division of labor. Thematically, A Christmas Carol explores disenchanted religion, offering a minimally Christian parable (what might be called An Ecumenical Non-Sectarian Interfaith Carol). But on the level of form, Dickens uses a mixture of genres – the ghost story and masque – and deliberate descriptive excess to present a world full of wholly secular wonders. Hence A Christmas Carol emerges as a surprisingly perceptive analysis of religion and secularism. It anticipates the central insights of secularization theory – the connections between faith, skepticism, and enchantment – while presenting religious possibilities that scholarship has only now begun to explore.

Dickens's account of faith and secularism is so subtle, in fact, that readers have often oversimplified its religious views. Recent scholarship on A Christmas Carol has tended to view the work's ethical power apart from religion, which becomes a vestigial remnant of the past and little more. Paul K. Saint-Amour, for instance, reads the work as a “performance of a kind of radical hospitality” (94) in which Scrooge undergoes “an encounter with radical otherness” (98). In this account, the holiday cheer surrounding the tale gives way to a more troubling sort of hospitality that exceeds any conventional “codes and duties” (95). Laurie Langbauer argues that A Christmas Carol anticipates “the central poststructural insight of the last generation . . . that we inhabit relations between self and others that are intractable, no one's fault, but still nevertheless everyone's obligation” (90). And Joseph Childers interprets the work as a site where Christmas becomes “a master trope for narratives that simultaneously laud and lament the effects of classical liberalism” (115). None of these readers find much of interest in the Christian elements of this work, joining a long history of Dickens criticism that sees him as a decidedly secular writer. Barbara Hardy's summary judgment that Dickens's “language is at its weakest, flattest, and cheapest when dealing with aesthetic and religious feeling” (7) is echoed throughout Dickensian scholarship. “In orthodox Christian terms,” as Dennis Walder puts it, “there is much that is missing, or at best negatively expressed, in Dickens's works” (2) . . . he “was not a religious novelist; nor were any of his novels primarily religious in intention or effect” (15).

When recent scholarship finds A Christmas Carol to be a largely secular work, it follows the line of interpretation largely favored by Dickens's own contemporaries. As Paul Davis makes clear, many Victorians interpreted the Carol as a “secular scripture” (51). Margaret Oliphant acknowledged its power to move readers – claiming that it had been received “as if it had been a new gospel” – though she faulted it for its absence of “spiritual discrimination” (quoted in Davis 59). Dickens's friend, Lord Jeffrey, wrote a letter praising the work for its “genuine goodness” (147), positing it as an alternative source of moral instruction. It would, he declared, promote “kindly feelings” and “positive acts of benevolence” better than “all the pulpits and confessionals in Christendom, since Christmas 1842” (Collins 148). Dickens's moral instruction, for Jeffrey, outweighed a year's worth of preaching. W. M. Thackeray, praising the book as a “national benefit” (Collins 149), saw its effects in worldly terms: “Had the book appeared a fortnight earlier, all the prize cattle would have been gobbled up in pure love and friendship” (149). In all these accounts, the power of A Christmas Carol comes from its ability to achieve humane but entirely secular feelings of goodwill. Even if, as Davis argues, A Christmas Carol melds “a secular story with a spiritual theme” (60), Oliphant and others were not wrong to perceive the work as a largely secular one. The scattered references to Christianity are fleeting moments in the text; while A Christmas Carol certainly praises religious belief, faith is relegated to the edge of the work's ethical vision.

But Dickens was not a skeptic; as Valentine Cunningham argues, Dickens was a man whose writing was “steeped . . . in the knowledge, the words, the stories, the rhetoric, the practices” (255) of the Church of England. When he directly addresses religious faith, he offers a variant of Christianity that preserves a minimal theological content while stressing its ethical components. His rewriting of the Gospels for his children (posthumously published as The Life of Our Lord) exhibits these two qualities that best characterize Dickens's faith: an emphasis on moral behavior and a strong aversion to any particular theological dogma (without making any concerted effort to deny the supernatural). He ends the work by offering a concentrated version of Christianity, declaring that the essence of the religion is “to do good always . . . to love our neighbour as ourself . . . to be gentle, merciful, and forgiving” (474). Here Dickens equates Christianity with virtuous activity, with no specific beliefs necessary. Furthermore, Dickens here downplays the supernatural; the faithful believer is told to hope that “God will forgive us our sins and mistakes, and enable us to live and die in Peace” (474). The supernatural rewards of religion are replaced with a sense of moral satisfaction and inner peace. This emphatic conclusion to The Life of Our Lord, as Walder has noted, sees Dickens emphasizing the “essentially moral features” of Christianity over its “supernatural elements” (13). And yet Dickens does not entirely reject the supernatural elements of the gospels. The text's concluding paragraph is somewhat misleading when taken on its own; while it is justly valued for clearly explaining what Dickens sees as the heart of Christianity, it appears at the end of a fairly orthodox (if decidedly undogmatic) religious narrative. The first paragraph of the work proclaims his belief in the supernatural and the afterlife, declaring that Jesus Christ “is now in Heaven, where we hope to go, and all to meet each other after we are dead” (441). And Dickens faithfully includes the accounts of miracles from the Gospel narratives, never questioning their veracity. He explains to his children that “God had given Jesus Christ the power to do such wonders; and he did them, that people might know he was not a common man, and might believe what he taught them, and also believe that God had sent him” (445). Even here, Dickens avoids dogmatic or theological controversy, offering a deliberately vague explanation of Christ's divinity: “because he did such Good, and taught people how to love God and how to hope to go to Heaven after death, he was called Our Saviour” (447). Nevertheless, The Life of Our Lord does not quite make the leap from liberal Christianity into genuine secularism. It instead embraces a Broad Church faith, one long on ethical implications and short on doctrinal claims. In essence, Dickens offers a variety of radical Protestantism that, as Charles Taylor puts it, “push[es] toward disenchantment” (266) without wholly rejecting the supernatural.

Why was a religious writer viewed, then as now, as the proponent of a secularized version of Christianity? Because the explicit religious content of A Christmas Carol occupies a position at the fringes of disenchanted faith, as close to secularism as possible. Its narrative never overtly rejects Christianity; typically, it pays a brief tribute to religious belief and then quickly diverts its attention to the secular world. Jacob Marley's prophetic warning, for instance, humanizes the Christian language of sin and punishment. Marley's fate derives from his neglect of a basic duty that all must follow: to “walk abroad among his fellow-men” (22; stave I), either in life or after death. Having disregarded this obligation, he warns Scrooge, he wears the chains he “forged in life” (22; stave I). Yet this passage is notable not just for Dickens's transformation of a familiar Christian topos – punishment after death for a sinful life – but also for its deeply humanistic version of “sin.” When Scrooge praises Marley's abilities as a businessman, Marley famously responds with the declaration “mankind was my business” (23; stave I). His fault was not neglecting religious faith but disregarding his obligations to other human beings. Marley does offer a few passing references to religious belief in his warning; the duty toward human solidarity, he tells Scrooge, is one that belongs to “any Christian spirit working kindly in its little sphere” (23; stave I). But the “Christian spirit” has little relationship to theology – belief is exchanged for benevolence. Even when Marley laments that he never looked at “that blessed Star which led the Wise Men to a poor abode” (24; stave I), his regret is not that he ignored any particular event of theological importance but that he did not follow the example of compassion that Christianity advocates. The Star of Bethlehem, for Marley, leads not to the Messiah but to “poor homes” (24; stave I) in London. His version of the nativity story replaces piety with philanthropy.

Marley's speech sets the tone for future religious references in A Christmas Carol: faith is always admired but never discussed extensively, and never with any sense that the details of theological belief matter. Perhaps the single most revealing of these brief examples comes when Scrooge is watching joyous Christmas celebrations with the second spirit. They see people wandering into “church and chapel” (47; stave III) for Christmas Eve services, one of the many examples of celebration that the pair witness. The balanced phrasing above (“church and chapel”) indicates the narrator's tolerant perspective on religious belief; any church, whether the established Church of England or a dissenting chapel, can join in the happy Christmas cheer. Even more significantly, Scrooge and the spirit do not join the worshippers inside their churches or chapels, preferring to remain in the streets. And at the work's climax, when Scrooge's life is transformed, faith remains largely a matter of rationalized ethics. Scrooge's encounter with the three spirits is redemptive, but in a minimally religious sense of the term. His reformation does include an appearance at church, but this activity is simply one of many things he does to show his Christmas spirit – we are told that he “went to church, and walked about the streets, and watched the people hurrying to and fro” (81; stave V), with no indication that the first of those activities is morally superior to the others. Church attendance is just one of many ways where Scrooge shows his new benevolence. (Nor is there any indication that Scrooge, once reformed, becomes a regular churchgoer – the narrator does not discuss his religious practices.) For Scrooge, as for A Christmas Carol itself, religion is worth practicing, but only in a way that sweeps the details of faith – and its supernatural elements – aside.

When the text does mention religious belief, it largely coincides with Dickens's own brand of cheerfully undogmatic Christianity. One of the two most extensive discussions of Christian faith – a paragraph of dialogue from Bob Cratchit, telling his wife about his trip to church with Tiny Tim – makes this pattern clear. Cratchit praises his son's behavior at church, admiring his display of humility and piety. The incident lingering in his mind, we are told, is when Tiny Tim tells his father that “he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see” (50; stave III). This brief line of dialogue holds true to Dickens's vague statements about Christianity. It is, on the one hand, undeniably Christian; the miracles Tiny Tim mentions are assumed to be genuine signs of divine power. And yet this statement leads to no real insights about religious belief or dogma. It treats Christianity favorably, but has nothing more to say about the supernatural content it mentions. This brief conversation between the Cratchits sets the tone for almost every discussion of faith in A Christmas Carol: as with Tiny Tim's pious reflections in church, the text approves of Christianity but is almost completely uninterested in the details of religious practice.

The one exception to this pattern, a moment where religious controversies are discussed in slightly more extensive detail, reinforces the disenchanted Christianity that Dickens preached in The Life of Our Lord and mentions briefly in the Carol. Scrooge, impressed with the good humor and happiness surrounding Christmas Eve, asks the Spirit why he “should desire to cramp these people's opportunities of innocent enjoyment” (48; stave III) by closing bakeries and other establishments on Sunday. And when Scrooge tells the Spirit that this Sabbatarian impulse has been carried out in the Spirit's name, the Spirit offers a caustic response:

This dialogue is the lengthiest treatment of religious practices in A Christmas Carol, and its harsh tone clashes with the mood of generosity and goodwill established earlier in the scene. But it is a revealing moment; while the Spirit shows all the benevolence that results from Christian worship, it also denounces any religious dogma that interferes with human happiness, particularly the rare pleasures afforded to the poor of London. The vague approving remarks about Christianity are exchanged, momentarily, for a brutal attack on evangelical piety. But this can be seen as the counterpart to the humane Social Gospel of Dickens's religion. If the heart of Christian belief, for Dickens, lies in treating one's neighbor with compassion and kindness, than a Christianity that impoverishes people's lives for ostensibly pious reasons would be a horrific distortion of true religion. Dickens's Broad-Church Christianity, then, takes two forms in its brief appearances here. It praises religion at its non-dogmatic best, promoting a “simple, New Testament Christianity” characterized by “the power of kindness and benevolence” (Ledger 123); and it attacks stringent forms of religion that interfere with human flourishing.

Hence A Christmas Carol’s forensic analysis of Christmas and ethics – its diagnosis of Scrooge's errors, and its promotion of a generous alternative – offers a Christianity so humanistic that it often becomes indistinguishable from secularism itself. In both its presentation of Scrooge's faults and its suggestions of a better life, the text's Christian categorizations appear to vanish in favor of secular judgments. The narrator introduces Scrooge as a “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner” (10; stave I), ending the litany of faults with an epithet drawn from Christian theology. But Scrooge does not sin against God but humanity; his contempt for his neighbors and his desire for “human sympathy to keep its distance” (10; stave I), make it clear that his faults can be understood without any reference to the supernatural content of Christianity. By contrast, Scrooge's nephew – whose good-hearted cheer models the ideal Christmas spirit that Scrooge will later adopt – differs in his attitude toward humanity, not his passing acknowledgment of Christianity. While he happily admits that Christmas cheer is affiliated with the “sacred name and origin” of Jesus Christ, his attention quickly drifts toward human sociability instead of theological musings. Christmas is valuable, he proclaims, because it teaches celebrants “to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys” (12; stave I). While this vision of Christmas-inspired solidarity acknowledges its roots in religious faith – Scrooge's nephew wonders if “anything belonging” to Christmas can be understood apart from its sacred origins – it casts aside the content of that belief in favor of humanist empathy. As Stanley Friedman has noted, this passage is “virtually indistinguishable from a statement by Bertrand Russell . . . [that] urges us to help ‘our comrades’” (49). Scrooge and his nephew are to be judged not by their attitudes toward God but by their views of humanity.

The overt religious content of A Christmas Carol, then, offers a disenchanted religious perspective so removed from its supernatural origins that many readers have been tempted to ignore its Christian ethos entirely. It marks a position where religious faith is as disenchanted as it can possibly get before tipping over into secular agnosticism. But alongside this extremely disenchanted religion lies a second and less familiar perspective, one which combines a genuine secularism with the sort of enchantment described by Bilgrami and Bennett. Hence A Christmas Carol combines the disenchanted faith it offers thematically with a secular enchantment created through its form. For A Christmas Carol does stylistically what its moral proclamations cannot; the language of the work establishes a sense of enchantment that has no place within its explicit statements on belief. This is the grain of truth in the common view that Dickens is not a particularly religious writer: it is not, as we have seen, that Dickens lacked religious views. But his stylistic and literary interests imply an attitude at odds with his overtly stated beliefs. Even as the theological content of A Christmas Carol offers an extremely Broad-Church Christianity, its formal experimentation with genre and style explores a blend of secular enchantment. While the text's explicit discussions of Christianity offer a severely rationalized religion, Scrooge's discoveries – and the heart of the text's literary accomplishments – occur in a universe full of secular wonders.

The clearest initial sign of Dickens's fascination with enchantment comes, of course, through his interest in the ghost story. The genre necessarily implies some sort of enchanted world beyond the accounts of scientific rationality. Ghost stories fundamentally violate the assumptions of the disenchanted universe, by positing supernatural beings that act on humans in the world. But they also assume a basic comfort with disenchantment, only to take that comfort away. They depend upon the surprise that comes when a rationalist perspective encounters things that cannot be explained scientifically. And Dickens plays with this set of assumptions when he describes Scrooge's encounter with Marley's ghost. Scrooge begins as the hard-headed skeptic, a man who refuses to believe in the supernatural, who learns to his surprise that supernatural beings are indisputably real. But this discovery does not refute disenchantment entirely; instead, it uses the methods of disenchantment to validate the existence of spirits. Marley's ghost, when claiming that he is indeed real, appeals to an empiricist epistemology: “What evidence would you have of my reality,” he asks, “beyond that of your senses?” (21; stave I). Scrooge responds by claiming that his senses are fallible – easily fooled by “an undigested bit of beef” or “a blot of mustard” (21; stave I) – but this response is a feeble one, and he quickly backs away from his skepticism. His “worldly mind” (22; stave I), as the Ghost puts it, must rapidly accept that supernatural beings exist.

Thus A Christmas Carol uses a genre whose conventions require the triumph of enchantment over disenchantment. And yet Dickens takes pains to limit this particular sort of supernatural belief. Ghosts and spirits occupy a position in A Christmas Carol much like that of divine activity in the text's Christian humanism: in both cases, their presence is affirmed but minimized. The miraculous encounter with the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future is not repeated; Scrooge, after his conversion, “had no further intercourse with Spirits, but lived upon the Total Abstinence Principle, ever afterwards” (83; stave V). As with the supernatural elements of Dickensian Christianity, Scrooge's brush with ghosts and spirits is a once-in-a-lifetime exception to a largely disenchanted world. And as in Dickens's Christian humanism, the exceptional nature of the supernatural focuses attention back on everyday life. Scrooge's “conversion” does not see him eagerly propagating his belief in spirits – those remain merely powerful memories – but rather treating other human beings with generosity and compassion. The supernatural becomes a vehicle for moral transformation, not something valued for its own sake. Nor do the spirits in A Christmas Carol show the full sense of agency often found in ghost stories. What is striking, in fact, is how little the ghosts actually do. They do not interfere with the world around them. Instead, they simply let Scrooge see what other people have done, are doing, or will do. Even the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, who necessarily depends on supernatural powers rather than simply intensifying memory or observation, is content to let Scrooge watch the future laid out for him. The spirits in the text do not act in the world; they simply observe it.

Although the genre of the ghost story insists on some degree of enchantment in order to work, then, Dickens limits the supernatural implications of his spirits and ghosts. But the ghost story is not the only genre that A Christmas Carol pursues. As J. Hillis Miller has argued, A Christmas Carol is a hybrid of a number of genres; the work can be plausibly considered “an allegory or a parable, or the text for a pantomime, or a conversion narrative, or a dream vision, or a melodrama, or a ghost story, or a Gothic tale, or the text for a dramatic reading or a monologue, all at once” (199). And the text's affinities with enchantment largely emerge through its use of a genre not listed in Miller's catalogue: the masque. When Dickens gathered the Christmas books together in one volume, he referred to his work as writing “a whimsical kind of masque” designed to “awaken some loving and forbearing thoughts” (3; preface). And while this comparison should not be extended beyond its usefulness – Dickens departs from the conventions of the masque in many key respects – A Christmas Carol shares the masque's interest in the visual. The genre depends on presentation in order to achieve its aesthetic ends; it is no wonder that scholars have used the term “spectacle” to indicate the genre's reliance on sight. The masque partakes in what Martin Butler has called “theatricalization of power” (20); it uses overwhelming visual force to make court power explicit. Dickens certainly does not share an interest in glorifying monarchical politics, but he adopts the central tenet of the masque – a tight connection between spectacle and power – for his own ends. By calling his Christmas books whimsical sorts of masques, Dickens places A Christmas Carol in a long line of texts that weave political and visual energies together.

Since Dickens fuses the ghost story with the masque, he invests both genres with a secular sort of magic and power. The ghosts change Scrooge's life not just because their power disrupts his sternly materialist outlook, but because of the force of what he is shown. And Dickens communicates this power by filling the text with detailed descriptions of its world. From the first pages of A Christmas Carol to the last, the text displays a fascination with even the most mundane details of everyday life. Scrooge learns that the world is a sort of “glorious pageant” (15; stave I), one far richer than his narrow focus on business allows him to see. Hence the ethical force of A Christmas Carol emerges from its focus on visual presentation. And this interest in spectacle explains why Dickens does not invest his spirits with the sort of agency and extensive power commonly found in the ghost story. Their power emerges through sight and representation, not active intervention in the world. The spirits of Christmases past, present, and future simply show Scrooge the world around him, because the power of seeing the world in detail suffices to change his prejudices. Thus visual presentation obviates the need for the spirits to act on the world itself. Instead, the spirits bring the joy surrounding Christmas to Scrooge's attention, and that spectacle accomplishes the moral transformation they desire. Becoming aware of the world surrounding him, by seeing it in all its depth and breadth, leads Scrooge to repent of his selfishness. In this way the text's affinities with the masque reinforce what Audrey Jaffe calls “the relationship between an individual subject and spectacular culture” (28). A Christmas Carol “posits the visual as a means toward recapturing one's lost or alienated self – and becoming one's best self” (Jaffe 29).

But the text's emphasis on the visual, the link it shares to the masque, also allows A Christmas Carol to explore the possibilities within secular enchantment. As Bennett uses the term, enchantment refers to a sense of wonder, a state of being “struck and shaken by the extraordinary that lives amid the familiar and the everyday” (4). It is a condition of being “enamored with existence” (4). As it happens, “enamored with existence” perfectly describes Scrooge's behavior after his encounter with the spirits. Wandering through London Christmas morning, he savors everything he comes across:

Scrooge, free to act in the world again, is not quite as passive as he was while visited by spirits, and he does indeed walk, speak, and even pat children on their heads. But the bulk of Scrooge's energies in this passage are spent observing – looking into windows, at passing neighbors, and so on. He has not simply learnt to care about the fate of others, but to value the world he inhabits rather than ignoring it in favor of his business. Nothing about what he sees is extraordinary or remarkable; Scrooge has simply learnt to appreciate the magnificence of the world he once despised. He learns the lesson so quickly, in fact, that he can appreciate everything presented to him even when its significance initially seems lacking. When the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shows him people he does not know having a seemingly meaningless conversation, he responds properly by assuming that these visions “had some latent moral for his own improvement” (66; stave IV). He trains himself, as a result, to “treasure up every word he heard, and everything he saw” (66; stave IV), on the correct assumption that it will compel him to understand himself better than he did before. Ethical behavior and this sort of secular enchantment, Dickens suggests, go hand in hand. Scrooge can only treat others with generosity once he has decided to value the world for all it offers. Bennett argues that “presumptive generosity, as well as the will to social justice, are sustained by periodic bouts of being enamored with existence” (12); Dickens, in his celebration of enchantment and the Christmas spirit, anticipates this argument and presents Scrooge as an embodiment of its effects. Seeing, for Scrooge, is believing.

The masque, as we have seen, is a genre that depends on visual effects, and Dickens appears determined to translate the visual power of the masque into the medium of prose fiction. This link to the masque helps explain the descriptive passages in A Christmas Carol that might otherwise seem excessive or indulgent. As Mieke Bal has argued, description has long been prone to criticism from rhetoricians and literary critics; it is often accused of “interrupting the flow of narrative, of stopping time in its tracks” (96). And this criticism, at first, seems particularly appropriate for a short work like A Christmas Carol, which has a limited amount of space to establish its narrative and would seem to have even less room for descriptive excess. Dickens, introducing the Christmas Books, acknowledged that his narratives were confined to a “narrow space” (3; preface), one that imposed difficulties challenging enough that he felt obliged to write a preface explaining “what is peculiar in their machinery” (3; preface). The limited space, he admits, kept him from “great elaboration of detail, in the working out of character within such limits” (3; preface); it is here that Dickens introduces the comparison of the masque to justify his use of archetypal characters. For while he eschews “great elaboration of detail” in the realm of characterization, he nevertheless embraces it in the domain of description. Joyous, enthusiastic accumulation of detail is, in fact, the major stylistic feature of A Christmas Carol; as Michael Hancher has recently noted, “extended scenic description” is one of the “characteristically Dickensian features” (816) of the work. Although some of the descriptive passages reinforce the text's ethical critique, Dickens's belief that seeing human sociability can cure Scrooge of his selfishness, other passages resist that interpretation. They seem to indulge in description's tendency to pause the narrative for inscrutable reasons.

Consider, for instance, the following typical passage, as the narrator describes Scrooge's room when visited by the spirit of Christmas Present:

This passage exemplifies what George Orwell referred to as Dickens's characteristic stylistic attribute, his fascination with the “unnecessary detail” (69). It is, in Peter Brooks's words, an example of “the accumulation of things, of details, of particularities, [that] could be considered nearly definitional of the realist novel” (16) – even if A Christmas Carol is not, of course, a realist work of fiction. And the passage seems surprisingly difficult to understand given conventional theories of literary description. It does not, for instance, partake in a Barthesian “reality effect”; this throne of food does not fall under the umbrella of realistic description. Since what Scrooge sees is a vision created by an otherworldly spirit, the accumulation of literal details does not attempt to convince us that we have access to an “unavowed verisimilitude” (Barthes 148). And if the throne of food was nothing more than an allegorical sign of the spirit's generosity (which on one level it certainly is), the extensive use of literal detail seems puzzling. Finally, the passage does not present a vision of suffering, showing Scrooge human beings in need, or a vision of happiness, showing Scrooge everything his narrow focus misses. It simply catalogs, in great detail, the food of a Christmas feast. This is a form of description even more disreputable than the scenic passages inspired by the masque. Elaine Freedgood has noted that “the Dickens novel has long been criticized for its thingfulness” (153); these sorts of passages, abundant in A Christmas Carol, are as “thingful” as any in his fiction.

By any number of critical accounts, then, – from narratologists frowning in description as a departure from story, to Marxist critics who see this sort of Dickensian description as “entirely symptomatic of what we reflexively understand as the bad materialism of commodity culture” (Freedgood 153) – these sorts of passages appear disastrous. But if we instead read the description for its relationship to enchantment, their place in the text becomes clear. Enchantment implies precisely this sort of fascination with everyday detail, and the belief that the objects of the world retain a power and force that cannot be rationalized away. Since Scrooge's reformation gains its power through a rediscovery of enchantment, as in his childlike embrace of everything around him on Christmas morning, the descriptive catalogs that recur throughout A Christmas Carol assume a central role in the text's awareness of secular enchantment. The deeply mundane nature of the objects described and catalogued does not weaken the text's discovery of enchantment. Rather, it demonstrates that a sense of wonder and fascination can accompany the humblest of details. The thick description and abundant catalogs thus concentrate on mundane objects, lingering on the material details of Scrooge's world, because they have proven significant enough to captivate without teaching any explicit ethical lesson. Meanwhile, the descriptive focus of A Christmas Carol teaches the reader to become enchanted by the world just as Scrooge has; Dickens's preface declares that his “chief purpose” is to “awaken some loving and forbearing thoughts” (3), and the extensive attention to visual detail forms the primary site for this rhetorical project. In A Christmas Carol, description does not exist to ground or contextualize the narrative. Instead, the narrative exists to celebrate the spectacular sights it offers – even when the description lingers on the supposedly mundane or forgettable elements of the world. The ethical lesson Dickens teaches, then, is not merely the rationalized religion the work discusses, but the wonder and mystery found in the purely secular world it describes.

By viewing description as the heart of the work and not a necessary evil or supplement, the text's fascination with cataloguing details can be seen as an embrace of secular enchantment. Dickens advances the same ethical theory as Bennett: that enchantment, the “state of openness to the disturbing-captivating elements in everyday experience . . . [can] . . . aid in the project of cultivating a stance of presumptive generosity” (Bennett 131). Consequently, the text lingers over details with no direct tie to Scrooge's selfishness, as in the loving descriptions of Christmas feasts. It even finds itself enchanted by details that run against the spirit of generosity and warmth found in the happy Christmas scenes. The Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come, for instance, shows Scrooge a “beetling shop” (66; stave IV) full of objects that lack the allure of Christmas desserts or meals: ”iron, old rags, bottles, bones, and greasy offal . . . heaps of rusty keys, nails, chains, hinges, files, scales, weights, and refuse iron of all kinds” (66; stave IV). None of the objects being described in this passage carry the allure of Christmas generosity, as in the abundant feasts mentioned throughout the text; in fact, they indicate the grim fate that Scrooge will meet if he does not change his ways. Nor are these objects symbolic; they simply function metonymically to reveal the shop's squalor. Yet the narrator lingers over these objects, giving them the same loving attention previously bestowed upon Christmas feasts. This description is not cheap filler padding out the story; it reveals, instead, the scope of the text's fascination with the matter of the world. Even garbage has the power to compel the narrator's attention. This sort of fascination with the everyday is the sort of secular enchantment Scrooge learns to develop through his experience with the spirits, and the narrative's investment in description – even of the least appealing and most mundane things – reinforces its importance.

A Christmas Carol's fascination with describing its world, then, indicates its commitment to an “enchantment” defined as a captivating with material reality. But the descriptive passages that blossom throughout the narrative also lend themselves to another form of secular enchantment, one supposedly impossible in a Weberian disenchanted universe. This is the sort of enchantment that Bilgrami has recently defended, one that finds a sense of agency and value in non-human objects, even in a genuinely secular world. According to this account, we live in a world in which “values are not all made up by us but often are aspects of the world that make normative demands on our agency” (“Critical Reply” 647). The objects and beings that populate the universe, Bilgrami argues, make claims upon our attention. They can be said, from our point of view, to have a sort of agency; their existence around us shapes our behavior and actions even though these objects possess no agency apart from human subjectivity. And thus they retain a measure of what can fairly be called enchantment. Bilgrami's version of enchantment need not imply divine beings or spirits; it simply insists that, contra Weber, the world remains full of forces and objects that, as far as we are concerned, are indeed “mysterious” and “incalculable.”

This second form of secular enchantment appears throughout the descriptions populating A Christmas Carol. Description does not just present pathetic or heart-rending visions to Scrooge in order to make him mend his ways. Nor does it stop at Bennett's form of enchantment, where everyday life has the power to captivate or disturb. Instead, Dickensian descriptive passages often bestow a strange sort of life on the things they depict. They frequently present, as John Bowen has noted, “inanimate objects made animate” (5): the door knocker that springs to life as Marley's ghost; Our Mutual Friend's Twemlow, introduced as a sort of living table; the teakettle in The Cricket on the Hearth, developing “irrepressible gurglings in its throat” (167; “Chirp the First”) and bursting into song of its own accord. Even the earliest passages of A Christmas Carol, before any explicit arrival of the supernatural, make use of this trope. The church bell, which “was always peeping slyly down at Scrooge,” rings out the hours of a cold Christmas Eve “as if its teeth were chattering in its frozen head” (14–15; stave I). This world is enchanted in Bilgrami's sense of the word, populated by objects that act on its human inhabitants and call for some sort of response. Dickens's use of personification is not just a rhetorical flight of fancy, but a mechanism for showing that the world, however rational and secular, remains active and mysterious. Scrooge and the Spirits may not act, but the world they observe certainly does.

Description in A Christmas Carol serves another purpose, then, beyond awakening ethical sympathies or inculcating a state of delight with the mundane details of the world (as important as those tasks are). It also shows Scrooge – and the reader – that a careful attention to the world reveals how it places claims upon human beings, how its objects carry a mysterious force without any necessary tie to ghosts or spirits. Another of Dickens's descriptions of food makes this point clear:

“Apoplectic opulence” is a perfect term for the luxurious descriptive passages that fill the text, indicating the magnificent excess that halts the narrative in its tracks. And this particular passage exemplifies the fantastic generosity of Dickens's Christmas, and the liberal Christian humanism that inspires it. But it would be a mistake to say that the food described here “symbolizes” this generous excess. Instead, I suggest we take the language of the passage at face value: the chestnuts, onions, and fruit mentioned here are generous, offering themselves to those who pass by and are receptive to their call. The three objects are explicitly personified as “jolly old gentlemen,” “Spanish Friars,” and “juicy persons”; they are indeed inanimate objects invested with a new sense of agency. Furthermore, they act on the world, tumbling out into streets and pleading with customers to take them home. The marvelous generosity exhibited by the food Dickens describes – most famously seen in the Cratchit family's enjoyment of a Christmas goose and pudding – is only available to those who see the food and hear its call. These objects, for Dickens, are not just significant for their emotional reminders or for their ability to enchant those with a childlike appreciation for the world. They have a power to act on the world, at least from the perspective of those who see them and respond.

These forms of secular enchantment together, then, account for the formal choices that shape A Christmas Carol. From Dickens's use of the principles of the masque, with its tight connection between visuality and power, to his insistence on filling the narrative with descriptive passages, the text advances a position quite different from its explicit statements embracing disenchanted religion. The generic and stylistic choices emphasize an enchantment that owes little to the genuinely supernatural but nevertheless escapes the mechanical, disenchanted Weberian universe. The sentimental images presented remind Scrooge of his moral obligations, advancing an ethical position shorn of the overt Christianity found elsewhere in the work. The mundane details described – food, buildings, even scraps of metal – become invested with a power to captivate that holds significant ethical potential. And the objects that the narrative lingers over are given an agency and power all their own, capable of compelling Scrooge – and those who see them – to respond to a force that, in many ways, is neither predictable nor under their control. If the novel's doctrine, such as it is, can be called a benevolent and undogmatic Christian humanism, its literary interests – its generic experimentation and insistence on descriptive excess – introduce a theological perspective at odds with liberal religion and disenchanted secularism alike.

It would be a mistake to view this strain of enchantment as a programmatic response to secularization. In fact, we can more easily say what Dickensian enchantment is not. A Christmas Carol offers no theological proclamations that directly challenge its liberal Protestantism. Hence Dickensian enchantment is not a sort of polytheism or paganism, one that would ground enchantment in a range of spirits or deities. Nor is it merely a species of Romanticism that praises the natural world's power. A Christmas Carol finds enchantment not in Mont Blanc or Tintern Abbey, but in the humble objects of London life: door knockers, church bells, onions, and so on. It is not even a call to simply appreciate the world's beauty; objects that are hideous and menacing, such as the “mountains of unseemly rags, masses of corrupted fat, and sepulchres of bones” (66; stave IV) Scrooge encounters at the beetling shop, have as much power as any of the book's Christmas feasts. Dickensian enchantment discovers agency and mystery in unexpected corners of the universe, without attempting to explain or define it. It rests content with Bennett's “state of wonder” (4) toward the world and its power to change us.

The vagueness of Dickens's non-theistic enchantment may disappoint readers looking for clear alternatives to secular rationalism. I would suggest, instead, that this vagueness may be its greatest strength. By refusing to explain the meaning of this power, A Christmas Carol remains open to a world that is far stranger, far more unpredictable, than its overt moral might imply. For some, the parable Dickens offers runs the risk of seeming too neat and tidy – turning the work, as Lee Edelman puts it, into “ruthless spiritual uplift” that forces an “obligatory hope for the future to come” (42) on its readers. In this reading, Dickens's Christian ethics pretends to an “openness to the difference of the Other” but “values such difference only to overcome it” (Edelman 60). But Dickensian enchantment does not offer a predictable future where otherness vanishes. Instead, it presents a world with the power to change us in ways we cannot determine in advance – making the future truly open to forces beyond our control. While the Christian morality of the text tells us to “do good always,” hoping for a better future to come, its enchantment warns us that we must do so in a radically open, unsettling world.

Perhaps it is this mixture of Christian humanism and agnostic enchantment, offering a hopeful ethics and a genuine uncanniness, that has given A Christmas Carol its long afterlife. For it simultaneously presents two possible alternatives to secular disenchantment, each retaining interest to this day. It embodies the two exceptions to the disenchantment narrative outlined by Bennett: a residual “divine space for enchantment” that forms the sole exception to an otherwise rationalized universe, and a very different sort of enchantment in which “even secular life houses extraordinary goings-on” (4). The former places its hope in a non-dogmatic Christianity and its ethics of compassion, while the latter presents a universe that neither faith nor reason can tame. Dickens's accomplishment in A Christmas Carol lies in his presentation of both positions as viable, compelling options. By juxtaposing disenchanted religion and secular enchantment side by side, A Christmas Carol serves as a reminder that very different religious beliefs coexist at single historical moments. And as scholarship revisits the theory of disenchantment – too important to abandon, too flawed to adopt uncritically – A Christmas Carol's rich insights can help us retain the theory's insights without overlooking disenchanted religion or enchanted secularism. A Christmas Carol emerges as something more than a Victorian bestseller and holiday favorite: it becomes a perceptive guide to religion and secularism's diverse possibilities.