Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in 1843, and its simple story about Ebenezer Scrooge’s moral reckoning has never lost its bite or its lesson: generosity, repentance, and the dignity of ordinary people matter. The novella’s ghosts force Scrooge to see the human consequences of his stinginess and indifference, a moral remedy that transformed him from miser to benefactor.

Right now, as the West lurches through a cultural transition that prizes victimhood and derides tradition, conservative readers should take Klavan’s prompt seriously and re-read Dickens with clear eyes. Andrew Klavan, a prominent conservative writer and Daily Wire voice, has been urging Americans to revisit these moral touchstones because they illuminate what makes a flourishing society — not woke slogans.

Dickens did not write A Christmas Carol to indulge sentimentality; he wrote it to wake a nation to its responsibilities toward the poor and to remind the comfortable that charity begins with conscience, not government coercion. The story’s vivid portrait of Ignorance and Want still shames the comfortable and challenges the indifferent to act out of personal virtue rather than to outsource morality to bureaucrats.

Klavan’s work is an example of what conservatives should be doing: using classic literature to revive a sense of moral seriousness and national solidarity. His own journey from skeptical intellectual to a defender of a moral law rooted in Western tradition shows why novels matter; Klavan has written and spoken about how great books shook him awake and drew him back to a sense of right and wrong.

Here’s the practical point for citizens who still believe in work, family, and faith: Dickens teaches that charity without responsibility is hollow and that a society survives when neighbors answer to one another, not when the state bludgeons people into compliance. If conservatives want to win hearts and minds, we should hand people books like A Christmas Carol and teach them how to read for moral formation, not just for hobbyist nostalgia.

So read Dickens again, not to indulge soft sentiment, but to steel yourself for the cultural fight ahead. Stand firm for traditions that foster real compassion — church and family and voluntary civic life — and reject the cynical idea that morality can be delegated to elites who despise the very values that built our prosperity. The remedy for the rot of the age starts with reclaiming our stories and their truth.