As any parent or teacher will attest, it is quite necessary to exaggerate characters with gestures and voices while story telling to capture the imagination of the audience and leave no confusion about who is who. This is exactly what Dickens was doing, so that his version of the Victorian world became one of overblown polarity: villains and do-gooders, the devout and the morally fallen, the wealthy and the poor, the beautiful and the ugly, the selfish and the selfless. Those who fall ‘somewhere between’ truly are the silent majority in Dickensian Britain.
Themes of the Book
A Christmas Carol was published in 1843, a mere six years after Queen Victoria came to the throne. At that time there was a feeling that the moral fibre of society was disintegrating due to a lapse in Christian values. The central character, Ebenezer Scrooge, is a wealthy but mean-fisted curmudgeon of a man and it is clear that Dickens blames his secularism for his disposition.
The plot is quite a simple one, seeing Scrooge visited by three ghosts, who cause him to see the error of his ways and redeem himself in time for Christmas. First he is visited by the ghost of Christmas past, so that he recalls his own childhood Christmases with friends and family. Having been softened by the memories of his youth, he is then visited by the ghost of Christmas present, so that he realises what a joyless skinflint he has become. Finally he is visited by the ghost of Christmas yet to come, allowing him a glimpse of what the future will hold if he doesn’t mend his ways.
A central devise in the tale is the use of a crippled boy named Timothy Cratchit, the son of Scrooges clerk Robert Cratchit. Scrooge hasn’t been paying Robert enough to clothe or feed his family and the third ghost conjures a bleak vision of ‘Tiny Tim’ dying as a direct result of Scrooges inhumanity to man.
In the event, Timothy doesn’t die and Scrooge, overwhelmed with a sense of guilt at his newfound self awareness, becomes a markedly changed man. Over night, he becomes empathetic, compassionate and generous. He switches from misanthrope to philanthropist in a way that could only happen in a Dickens novel.
Nevertheless, A Christmas Carol made a considerable impact on Victorian society, not least because it was perceived as a moral instruction at a time when the divide between the haves and the have-nots was considerable. The message was essentially that the well-off should see it as their moral and ethical duty to be benefactors to those subsisting in poverty. Furthermore, they should view Christmas as their annual touchstone, to reflect on their good fortune and see to it that the cold and hungry had something to celebrate.
Indeed, it has been suggested that Dickens played a part in resurrecting Christmas in Britain. Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, also brought new elements to the celebration of Christmas from Germany; namely the Christmas tree and the Christmas card. The consequence was that Christmas became a more focussed and inclusive affair, which suited the Victorian notion that Christian values were a prerequisite to creating and maintaining a civilization with moral fortitude.
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 2 The First of the Three Spirits
CHAPTER 3 The Second of the Three Spirits
CHAPTER 4 The Last of the Spirits
Classic Literature: Words and Phrases
I have endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it.
Their faithful Friend and Servant,
C. D.
December 1843
Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good upon ‘Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a doornail.
Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a doornail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a doornail.
Scrooge knew he was dead? Of course he did. How could it be otherwise? Scrooge and he were partners for I don’t know how many years. Scrooge was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend and sole mourner.
And even Scrooge was not so dreadfully cut up by the sad event, but that he was an excellent man of business on the very day of the funeral, and solemnized it with an undoubted bargain.
The mention of Marley’s funeral brings me back to the point I started from. There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate. If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet’s Father died before the play began, there would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts, than there would be in any other middle-aged gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy spot – say Saint Paul’s Churchyard for instance – literally to astonish his son’s weak mind.
Scrooge never painted out Old Marley’s name. There it stood, years afterwards, above the warehouse door: Scrooge and Marley. The firm was known as Scrooge and Marley. Sometimes people new to the business called Scrooge Scrooge, and sometimes Marley, but he answered to both names: it was all the same to him.
Oh! but he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, 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,