Scrooge sees “his poor forgotten self as he used to be” (27) at school and then working at a warehouse, increasingly eaten up by “the master-passion, Gain” (34). The first ghost takes Scrooge on a journey back in time, which reflects the Victorians’ growing fascination with time travel. Scrooge is to be haunted by three spirits: the Ghost of Christmas Past, the Ghost of Christmas Present, and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. Marley has come to warn Scrooge that his dead partner’s fate might become his own, yet he promises hope of escape. The ghost’s gothic paraphernalia have been updated to suit the Victorian businessman. Scrooge soon hears an ominous clinking of chains, and Marley’s ghost appears through the door, dragging, like a tail, a chain made of “cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel” (17). He should!” (10).Īt home in his “gloomy suite of rooms” (14), he finds them haunted, as the knocker is transformed into Marley’s face. He has little patience with the trappings or the spirit of Christmas: “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. Scrooge then ridicules his nephew’s seasonal greetings, begrudges his clerk his half-holiday, and repulses charitable organizations, which he regards as interference with the natural “decrease the surplus population” (12). As the opening thus assures the reader of Jacob Marley’s death seven years earlier, it moreover emphasizes Scrooge’s spiritual death-in-life. secret, and selfcontained, and solitary as an oyster,” he is “an excellent man of business on the very day of funeral,” which he “solemnised. “ squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner. The story recounts the miserly Ebeneezer Scrooge’s spiritual transformation through four ghostly visitations.
A Christmas Carol was followed by The Chimes (1844), The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), The Battle of Life (1846), and The Haunted Man (1848). Written in October and November 1843, it was specifically produced for the Christmas season, which began to be transformed into and was increasingly commercialized as a family celebration during the mid-Victorian era. The first of Charles Dickens’s Christmas Books, A Christmas Carol in Prose Being a Ghost Story of Christmas is a fairy-tale-like ghost story that has contributed much to the formation of the Christmas story as a genre. Analysis of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol
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