Back to: Dickens A Christmas Carol and the Bible
‘This is the even-handed dealing of the world.’ he said. ‘There is nothing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth.’
1. A Vicious Cycle
Scrooge is caught in the vicious cycle of a worldly mindset: he justifies his worldly pursuit by condemning the harshness of the world. In this, God is not god, and neither is the world—man himself is god, free to shift his judgments based on what benefits him
‘You fear the world too much,’ she answered, gently. ‘All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach. I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one by one, until the master-passion, Gain, engrosses you. Have I not.’
2. Idol Worship
‘ Isaiah 5:20-24 Scrooge knew the tenderness of human love but he, carelessly cast aside that love for the sake of an idol as surely as Israel cast aside their stewardship of justice and mercy to for the idols greed and self pleasure
Ah, you who call evil good
Therefore, as the tongue of fire devours the stubble,
Scrooge’s journey toward idol worship was similar to Israel’s journey when they replaced their worship of a loving, living God for a material golden idol.
Scrooge’s idol worship can not buy him a home or family. When the Spirit brings him to the home that he could have had with his young companion and contrasts it by an image of him alone at work in his business Scrooge is brought to tears and pleads with the Spirit to “take him away from this place.”
Scrooge’s gold buys him loneliness in a crowd and poverty amidst great wealth.
1 Timothy 6:5,6 (KJV) Paul talked about such men engrossed by Gain in 1 Timothy 6:5,6 (KJV) when he spoke of “perverse disputings of men of corrupt minds, and destitute of the truth, supposing that gain is godliness: from such withdraw thyself.” In contrast, “godliness with contentment is great gain
5 and wrangling among those who are depraved in mind and bereft of the truth, imagining that godliness is a means of gain.[a] 6 Of course, there is great gain in godliness combined with contentment;
What then.’ he retorted. ‘Even if I have grown so much wiser, what then. I am not changed towards you.’
She shook her head.
‘Am I.’
‘Our contract is an old one. It was made when we were both poor and content to be so, until, in good season, we could improve our worldly fortune by our patient industry. You are changed. When it was made, you were another man.’
‘I was a boy,’ he said impatiently.
‘Your own feeling tells you that you were not what you are,’ she returned. ‘I am. That which promised happiness when we were one in heart, is fraught with misery now that we are two. How often and how keenly I have thought of this, I will not say. It is enough that I have thought of it, and can release you.’
‘Have I ever sought release.’
‘In words. No. Never.’
‘In what, then.’
‘In a changed nature; in an altered spirit; in another atmosphere of life; another Hope as its great end. In everything that made my love of any worth or value in your sight. If this had never been between us,’ said the girl, looking mildly, but with steadiness, upon him;’ tell me, would you seek me out and try to win me now. Ah, no.’
He seemed to yield to the justice of this supposition, in spite of himself. But he said with a struggle,’ You think not.’
‘I would gladly think otherwise if I could,’ she answered, ‘Heaven knows. When I have learned a Truth like this, I know how strong and irresistible it must be. But if you were free to-day, to-morrow, yesterday, can even I believe that you would choose a dowerless girl — you who, in your very confidence with her, weigh everything by Gain: or, choosing her, if for a moment you were false enough to your one guiding principle to do so, do I not know that your repentance and regret would surely follow. I do; and I release you. With a full heart, for the love of him you once were.’
3. Repentance and regret
The woman, earlier described as wearing a mourning dress, has lost her parents (either the last living one or both at the same time) and has been left penniless. Without any money, she feels she is less attractive to Scrooge—and the “old sinner,” adding insult to injury does not deny Like two roadside signs, Dickens names the two biblical principles—“repentance and regret”—that Scrooge must deal with at this point in his spiritual journey
He was about to speak; but with her head turned from him, she resumed.
‘You may — the memory of what is past half makes me hope you will — have pain in this. A very, very brief time, and you will dismiss the recollection of it, gladly, as an unprofitable dream, from which it happened well that you awoke. May you be happy in the life you have chosen.’
4. Unprofitable dream
An “unprofitable dream” as opposed to a profitable one—such as the one Scrooge is having now? Dickens seems to play with the interpretation of reality in the events unfolding
She left him, and they parted.
‘Spirit.’ said Scrooge,’ show me no more. Conduct me home. Why do you delight to torture me.’
5. Scrooge’s third regret
->To mark the moment of Scrooge’s third regret, before crossing it out for the final draft, Dickens originally continued with “And as he spoke he pressed his hands against his head, and stamped upon the ground
‘One shadow more.’ exclaimed the Ghost.
‘No more.’ cried Scrooge. ‘No more, I don’t wish to see it. Show me no more.’
But the relentless Ghost pinioned him in both his arms, and forced him to observe what happened next.
Scene 6 In the home of a family- Belle
They were in another scene and place; a room, not very large or handsome, but full of comfort. Near to the winter fire sat a beautiful young girl, so like that last that Scrooge believed it was the same, until he saw her, now a comely matron, sitting opposite her daughter. The noise in this room was perfectly tumultuous, for there were more children there, than Scrooge in his agitated state of mind could count; and, unlike the celebrated herd in the poem, they were not forty children conducting themselves like one, but every child was conducting itself like forty. The consequences were uproarious beyond belief; but no one seemed to care; on the contrary, the mother and daughter laughed heartily, and enjoyed it very much; and the latter, soon beginning to mingle in the sports, got pillaged by the young brigands most ruthlessly. What would I not have given to one of them. Though I never could have been so rude, no, no. I wouldn’t for the wealth of all the world have crushed that braided hair, and torn it down; and for the precious little shoe, I wouldn’t have plucked it off, God bless my soul. to save my life. As to measuring her waist in sport, as they did, bold young brood, I couldn’t have done it; I should have expected my arm to have grown round it for a punishment, and never come straight again. And yet I should have dearly liked, I own, to have touched her lips; to have questioned her, that she might have opened them; to have looked upon the lashes of her downcast eyes, and never raised a blush; to have let loose waves of hair, an inch of which would be a keepsake beyond price: in short, I should have liked, I do confess, to have had the lightest licence of a child, and yet to have been man enough to know its value.
6. One more painful episode of the past Christmas
One more painful episode of the past Christmas awaits Scrooge. It comes in a scene that could only have been written by one who—like Dickens—knew something about being the father of many children. It is another depiction of family warmth and comfort, but, in contrast to the Fezziwig party, the good feeling does not depend on wealth to make it possible. Instead, a happy marriage and a large, harmonious family account for the delightful scene of happy chaos that Scrooge sees. It turns out to be the modest home of his former love, who is enjoying the company of what Scrooge imagines to be at least forty children, romping around the living room and laughing. “The consequences [of all this playfulness] were uproarious beyond belief; but no one seemed to care; on the contrary, the mother and daughter laughed heartily, and enjoyed it very much.”
Scrooge watches as the daughter plays with her future suitors and thinks of how he once was coupled with her mother. What Dickens gets exactly right here is the power of small details of recollected happiness to bring forth great feeling. If these are happy memories, they bring gratitude; but, if not happy, if one like Scrooge had deliberately walked away from these moments of life, they bring on remorse and a terrible sense of personal loss. Such it is with Scrooge, who says, in effect: What would I have not given to have been able to partake of this domestic joy.
The playful joy comes to a halt as the father of the family walks in with a porter carrying a load of Christmas presents. An outbreak of “irrepressible affection” greets the father.
-> This scene, followed by one in which the daughter sits with her parents by the fire, prompts Scrooge to wish for the first time that he had chosen a different life, one in which another daughter, “quite as graceful and full of promise, might have called him father, and been a spring-time in the haggard winter of his life
But now a knocking at the door was heard, and such a rush immediately ensued that she with laughing face and plundered dress was borne towards it the centre of a flushed and boisterous group, just in time to greet the father, who came home attended by a man laden with Christmas toys and presents. Then the shouting and the struggling, and the onslaught that was made on the defenceless porter.
7. Dickens - not a Scrooge
Dickens was just as generous—not only with his own children, but others as well. As his daughter Mamie wrote in her book My Father As I Recall Him (1896):
“My father used to take us, every twenty-fourth day of December, to a toy shop in Holborn, where we were allowed to select our Christmas presents, and also any that we wished to give to our little companions. Although we were often an hour or more in the shop before our several tastes were satisfied, he never showed the least impatience, was always interested, and as desirous as we, that we should choose exactly what we liked best.”
The scaling him with chairs for ladders to dive into his pockets, despoil him of brown-paper parcels, hold on tight by his cravat, hug him round his neck, pommel his back, and kick his legs in irrepressible affection. The shouts of wonder and delight with which the development of every package was received. The terrible announcement that the baby had been taken in the act of putting a doll’s frying-pan into his mouth, and was more than suspected of having swallowed a fictitious turkey, glued on a wooden platter. The immense relief of finding this a false alarm. The joy, and gratitude, and ecstasy. They are all indescribable alike. It is enough that by degrees the children and their emotions got out of the parlour, and by one stair at a time, up to the top of the house; where they went to bed, and so subsided.
And now Scrooge looked on more attentively than ever, when the master of the house, having his daughter leaning fondly on him, sat down with her and her mother at his own fireside; and when he thought that such another creature, quite as graceful and as full of promise, might have called him father, and been a spring-time in the haggard winter of his life, his sight grew very dim indeed.
‘Belle,’ said the husband, turning to his wife with a smile,’ I saw an old friend of yours this afternoon.’
8. Scrooge wants to be rescued from these moments
It is too much for Scrooge; he begs to be rescued from the power of these moments, but the ghost reminds him that these vignettes are “shadows” of what Scrooge himself has brought into being: “That they are what they are, do not blame me!” Scrooge is tormented by the irreversible nature of each word spoken, each deed done in the earthly life. The scene ends in Scrooge’s pathetic (but also almost comical) failure to extinguish the light used by the ghost to bring all these moments back into view. Like so many others who have been emotionally undone by events or feelings in their lives, Scrooge looks to sleep, which, as Shakespeare says in Macbeth, can “knit up the raveled sleeve of care.”
Like the bells elsewhere in Carol, Dickens has this “Belle” also herald a divine message, as bitter as it is, meant for Scrooge’s spiritual “reclamation” (rehabilitation)
Dickens had his own “Belle,” of whom he wrote to his friend Forster in January, 1855, “A sense comes always crushing on me now…as of one happiness I have missed in life, and one friend and companion I have never made
‘Who was it.’
‘Guess.’
‘How can I. Tut, don’t I know.’ she added in the same breath, laughing as he laughed. ‘Mr Scrooge.’
‘Mr Scrooge it was. I passed his office window; and as it was not shut up, and he had a candle inside, I could scarcely help seeing him. His partner lies upon the point of death, I hear; and there he sat alone. Quite alone in the world, I do believe.’
‘Spirit.’ said Scrooge in a broken voice,’ remove me from this place.’
‘I told you these were shadows of the things that have been,’ said the Ghost. ‘That they are what they are, do not blame me.’
‘Remove me.’ Scrooge exclaimed,’ I cannot bear it.’
He turned upon the Ghost, and seeing that it looked upon him with a face, in which in some strange way there were fragments of all the faces it had shown him, wrestled with it.
‘Leave me. Take me back. Haunt me no longer.’
In the struggle, if that can be called a struggle in which the Ghost with no visible resistance on its own part was undisturbed by any effort of its adversary, Scrooge observed that its light was burning high and bright; and dimly connecting that with its influence over him, he seized the extinguisher-cap, and by a sudden action pressed it down upon its head.
9. Jacob wrestling with a spirit from Genesis 32
Genesis 32
Scrooge wrestling with the Spirit recalls the biblical account of Jacob wrestling with a spirit from Genesis 32. In both stories, a spiritual being chastises a man for past sins, the man wrestles with the spirit as he tries to secure a favor, and the spirit is overcome
The Spirit dropped beneath it, so that the extinguisher covered its whole form; but though Scrooge pressed it down with all his force, he could not hide the light: which streamed from under it, in an unbroken flood upon the ground.
->Dickens indicates that, although Scrooge fights against the Spirit, he has seen the “light”—and cannot forget its lesson
He was conscious of being exhausted, and overcome by an irresistible drowsiness; and, further, of being in his own bedroom. He gave the cap a parting squeeze, in which his hand relaxed; and had barely time to reel to bed, before he sank into a heavy sleep
For Christian readers who interpret Scrooge’s visitations as a dream, this seems the second most obvious indication
He finds himself drowsy in his bedroom—and apparently puts out his bedside candle before falling back to sleep
The Spirit dropped beneath it, so that the extinguisher covered its whole form; but though Scrooge pressed it down with all his force, he could not hide the light, which streamed from under it, in an unbroken flood upon the ground.
He was conscious of being exhausted, and overcome by an irresistible drowsiness; and, further, of being in his own bedroom. He gave the cap a parting squeeze, in which his hand relaxed; and had barely time to reel to bed, before he sank into a heavy sleep.
and good evil,
who put darkness for light
and light for darkness,
who put bitter for sweet
and sweet for bitter!
21 Ah, you who are wise in your own eyes,
and shrewd in your own sight!
22 Ah, you who are heroes in drinking wine
and valiant at mixing drink,
23 who acquit the guilty for a bribe,
and deprive the innocent of their rights!
and as dry grass sinks down in the flame,
so their root will become rotten,
and their blossom go up like dust;
for they have rejected the instruction of the Lord of hosts,
and have despised the word of the Holy One of Israel.