The First of the Three Spirits - illustration by Harry Furniss (1910). When Scrooge demands to know its business, the Spirit replies, "Your welfare!" When Scrooge demurs that he would rather benefit from a good night's sleep, the Spirit responds, "Your reclamation, then. And in the very wonder of this, it would be itself again distinct and clear as ever. For as its belt sparkled and glittered now in one part and now in another, and what was light one instant, at another time was dark, so the figure itself fluctuated in its distinctness: being now a thing with one arm, now with one leg, now with twenty legs, now a pair of legs without a head, now a head without a body: of which dissolving parts, no outline would be visible in the dense gloom wherein they melted away. But the strangest thing about it was, that from the crown of its head there sprung a bright clear jet of light, by which all this was visible and which was doubtless the occasion of its using, in its duller moments, a great extinguisher for a cap, which it now held under its arm.Įven this, though, when Scrooge looked at it with increasing steadiness, was not its strangest quality. Its legs and feet, most delicately formed, were, like those upper members, bare. The arms were very long and muscular the hands the same, as if its hold were of uncommon strength. Its hair, which hung about its neck and down its back, was white as if with age and yet the face had not a wrinkle in it, and the tenderest bloom was on the skin. It was a strange figure-like a child: yet not so like a child as like an old man, viewed through some supernatural medium, which gave him the appearance of having receded from the view, and being diminished to a child’s proportions. The Spirit of Christmas Past meets Scrooge - illustration by Sol Eytinge Jr. In addition, the constantly changing aspect of the Spirit may be attributed to representing the various other people seen in the visions revealed to Scrooge: The Ghost’s clothing continues in the same contradictory vein as it holds a branch of holly, which symbolises Winter while its robe is trimmed with summer flowers. As the Spirit represents Scrooge's youth so it can appear youthful, and its skin is of the "tenderest bloom" but as Scrooge is now old so the Spirit will also appear old, to reflect this. As one memory comes sharply into focus another fades. The Ghost of Christmas Past is a strange, otherworldly creature which shimmers and flickers like a candlelight, constantly changing in appearance as it reflects Scrooge's memories, old and new. In this novella, Dickens was innovative in making the existence of the supernatural a natural extension of the real world in which Scrooge and his contemporaries lived. ĭickens's friend John Forster said that Dickens had 'a hankering after ghosts’, while not actually having a belief in them himself, and his journals Household Words and All the Year Round regularly featured ghost stories, with the novelist publishing an annual ghost story for some years after his first, A Christmas Carol, in 1843. Originally intending to write a political pamphlet titled, An Appeal to the People of England, on behalf of the Poor Man's Child, he changed his mind and instead wrote A Christmas Carol which voiced his social concerns about poverty and injustice. Indeed, Dickens himself had experienced poverty as a boy when he was forced to work in a blacking factory after his father's imprisonment for debt. Dickens portrait by Margaret Gillies (1843), painted during the period when he was writing A Christmas Carol.īy early 1843, Dickens had been affected by the treatment of the poor, and in particular the treatment of the children of the poor after witnessing children working in appalling conditions in a tin mine and following a visit to a ragged school.
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