Back to: Dickens A Christmas Carol and the Bible
1. Theme of Repentence
The Biblical theme is Repentance, and the key scripture is 2 Corinthians 7:10
Scrooge repents of his cynical spirit as this Ghost shows him how Christmas is truly kept. On Christmas Day, the Cratchits prove that while poor in finances, they are rich in family. And Scrooge notes how well they love despite how badly he treats their father Bob. Finally, Scrooge is touched by Tiny Tim, who toasts to Scrooge’s health even as his own fails him.
While in Stave Two we saw Scrooge feeling sorry for the shadows of his past self, it’s in Stave Three that we see him Begin to change in the present, and watch him even as he learns how to do that. The Ghost of Christmas Present shows the cynical man how Christmas is truly kept: revealing to the old miser people with empty hands, but generous hearts; people in lowly conditions, who yet rejoice; people who lack material wealth, and still are rich in family and friends. Through these scenes, and the feelings that come with them, Ebenezer’s regrets bring him to repentance.
Stave 3: The Second of the Three Spirits
Awaking in the middle of a prodigiously tough snore, and sitting up in bed to get his thoughts together, Scrooge had no occasion to be told that the bell was again upon the stroke of One. He felt that he was restored to consciousness in the right nick of time, for the especial purpose of holding a conference with the second messenger despatched to him through Jacob Marley’s intervention. But, finding that he turned uncomfortably cold when he began to wonder which of his curtains this new spectre would draw back, he put them every one aside with his own hands, and lying down again, established a sharp look-out all round the bed. For, he wished to challenge the Spirit on the moment of its appearance, and did not wish to be taken by surprise, and made nervous.
2. Scrooge is willing to cooperate
After the last visitation, being a bit further down the road of rehabilitation, Scrooge wants to express to the second Spirit his willingness to cooperate
Gentlemen of the free-and-easy sort, who plume themselves on being acquainted with a move or two, and being usually equal to the time-of-day, express the wide range of their capacity for adventure by observing that they are good for anything from pitch-and-toss to manslaughter; between which opposite extremes, no doubt, there lies a tolerably wide and comprehensive range of subjects. Without venturing for Scrooge quite as hardily as this, I don’t mind calling on you to believe that he was ready for a good broad field of strange appearances, and that nothing between a baby and rhinoceros would have astonished him very much.
Now, being prepared for almost anything, he was not by any means prepared for nothing; and, consequently, when the Bell struck One, and no shape appeared, he was taken with a violent fit of trembling. Five minutes, ten minutes, a quarter of an hour went by, yet nothing came. All this time, he lay upon his bed, the very core and centre of a blaze of ruddy light, which streamed upon it when the clock proclaimed the hour; and which, being only light, was more alarming than a dozen ghosts, as he was powerless to make out what it meant, or would be at; and was sometimes apprehensive that he might be at that very moment an interesting case of spontaneous combustion, without having the consolation of knowing it. At last, however, he began to think — as you or I would have thought at first; for it is always the person not in the predicament who knows what ought to have been done in it, and would unquestionably have done it too — at last, I say, he began to think that the source and secret of this ghostly light might be in the adjoining room, from whence, on further tracing it, it seemed to shine. This idea taking full possession of his mind, he got up softly and shuffled in his slippers to the door.
3. Color symbolism
Finally, in search of the next spirit, Scrooge walks into a room that is his own but utterly transformed—bedecked in all manner of Christmas decorations—winter greens and red berries.
Dickens uses white to color the first Spirit; green to color the second Spirit. Green is symbolically the color of growth. In Carol, tellingly the rehabilitating Scrooge sees “his own room” has “undergone a surprising transformation” being covered with “living green.”
The moment Scrooge’s hand was on the lock, a strange voice called him by his name, and bade him enter. He obeyed.
It was his own room. There was no doubt about that. But it had undergone a surprising transformation. The walls and ceiling were so hung with living green, that it looked a perfect grove; from every part of which, bright gleaming berries glistened. The crisp leaves of holly, mistletoe, and ivy reflected back the light, as if so many little mirrors had been scattered there; and such a mighty blaze went roaring up the chimney, as that dull petrification of a hearth had never known in Scrooge’s time, or Marley’s, or for many and many a winter season gone. Heaped up on the floor, to form a kind of throne, were turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch, that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam. In easy state upon this couch, there sat a jolly Giant, glorious to see, who bore a glowing torch, in shape not unlike Plenty’s horn, and held it up, high up, to shed its light on Scrooge, as he came peeping round the door.
4. A cornucopia of festive foods
Scrooge also seems to have walked into a cornucopia of festive foods, an offering so massive as to be almost claustrophobic, as if all of London’s restaurants, grocers, bakeries, butchers, and wineries had sent its foods and goods to Scrooge’s household. A more informal, less formidable figure beckons him.
In this Spirit, Dickens portrays the English character of Father Christmas, who is typically pictured as a “jolly Giant” in a fur-trimmed green robe and a holly crown
Twelfth-cakes were pastries served on Twelfth Night, the last night of celebration before Epiphany on January 6, which was held as the day the wise men reached the baby Jesus
‘Come in.’ exclaimed the Ghost. ‘Come in, and know me better, man.’
Scrooge entered timidly, and hung his head before this Spirit. He was not the dogged Scrooge he had been; and though the Spirit’s eyes were clear and kind, he did not like to meet them.
‘I am the Ghost of Christmas Present,’ said the Spirit. ‘Look upon me.’
Scrooge reverently did so. It was clothed in one simple green robe, or mantle, bordered with white fur. This garment hung so loosely on the figure, that its capacious breast was bare, as if disdaining to be warded or concealed by any artifice. Its feet, observable beneath the ample folds of the garment, were also bare; and on its head it wore no other covering than a holly wreath, set here and there with shining icicles. Its dark brown curls were long and free; free as its genial face, its sparkling eye, its open hand, its cheery voice, its unconstrained demeanour, and its joyful air. Girded round its middle was an antique scabbard; but no sword was in it, and the ancient sheath was eaten up with rust.
5. Holly as a symbol
Dickens indicates the Spirit needs no sword because he is a messenger of Christ, the Prince of Peace, who holds ultimate victory
‘You have never seen the like of me before.’ exclaimed the Spirit.
‘Never,’ Scrooge made answer to it.
‘Have never walked forth with the younger members of my family; meaning (for I am very young) my elder brothers born in these later years.’ pursued the Phantom.
‘I don’t think I have,’ said Scrooge. ‘I am afraid I have not. Have you had many brothers, Spirit.’
‘More than eighteen hundred,’ said the Ghost.
6. Gods Light
(1,843, to be exact).
Hebrews 12:29 29 for indeed our God is a consuming fire. LIGHT -Unlike the previous Spirit which exuded clear light, the light that accompanies the second Spirit is firelight. In the Bible, fire represents divine power, as in the “tongues of fire” that rested upon the apostles at Pentecost in Acts 2:3 or the description of God as a “consuming fire” in Hebrews 12:29.
The second Spirit that visits Scrooge is the Seekers or star candle a bright star shoots out from the top of its head. The ghost opens the curtains by his bed directly in front of Scrooge’s face. Scrooge cannot hide from the light, it shines directly in his view and he must pay attention to it. Yet instead of having a willingness to following the star as the Magi did, Scrooge is more like Herod who seeks to put the light out because the light threatens his royal right of self rule.
Our God’s light searches our innermost thoughts and motives and this can cause a painful honesty.
.” 1 Chronicles 28:9 “For the LORD searches every heart and understands every motive behind the thoughts. If you seek him, he will be found by you; but if you forsake him, he will reject you forever.”
‘A tremendous family to provide for.’ muttered Scrooge.
The Ghost of Christmas Present rose.
‘Spirit,’ said Scrooge submissively,’ conduct me where you will. I went forth last night on compulsion, and I learnt a lesson which is working now. To-night, if you have aught to teach me, let me profit by it.’
‘Touch my robe.’
Scrooge did as he was told, and held it fast.
7. Cloak of Christ
Matthew 9:20:22
The robe of the Spirit, which aids in the spiritual healing of Scrooge when he touches it, recalls the cloak of Christ, which aids in the physical healing of a woman when she touches in
20 Then suddenly a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years came up behind him and touched the fringe of his cloak, 21 for she said to herself, “If I only touch his cloak, I will be made well.” 22 Jesus turned, and seeing her he said, “Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well.” And instantly the woman was made well.
Scenes
1 Streets of London on Christmas morning, snowy –
Holly, mistletoe, red berries, ivy, turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, meat, pigs, sausages, oysters, pies, puddings, fruit, and punch, all vanished instantly. So did the room, the fire, the ruddy glow, the hour of night, and they stood in the city streets on Christmas morning, where (for the weather was severe) the people made a rough, but brisk and not unpleasant kind of music, in scraping the snow from the pavement in front of their dwellings, and from the tops of their houses, whence it was mad delight to the boys to see it come plumping down into the road below, and splitting into artificial little snow-storms.
The house fronts looked black enough, and the windows blacker, contrasting with the smooth white sheet of snow upon the roofs, and with the dirtier snow upon the ground; which last deposit had been ploughed up in deep furrows by the heavy wheels of carts and waggons; furrows that crossed and recrossed each other hundreds of times where the great streets branched off; and made intricate channels, hard to trace in the thick yellow mud and icy water. The sky was gloomy, and the shortest streets were choked up with a dingy mist, half thawed, half frozen, whose heavier particles descended in shower of sooty atoms, as if all the chimneys in Great Britain had, by one consent, caught fire, and were blazing away to their dear hearts’ content. There was nothing very cheerful in the climate or the town, and yet was there an air of cheerfulness abroad that the clearest summer air and brightest summer sun might have endeavoured to diffuse in vain.
For, the people who were shovelling away on the housetops were jovial and full of glee; calling out to one another from the parapets, and now and then exchanging a facetious snowball — better-natured missile far than many a wordy jest — laughing heartily if it went right and not less heartily if it went wrong. The poulterers’ shops were still half open, and the fruiterers’ were radiant in their glory. There were great, round, round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of jolly old gentlemen, lolling at the doors, and tumbling out into the street in their apoplectic opulence. There were ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish Friars, and winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe. There were pears and apples, clustered high in blooming pyramids; there were bunches of grapes, made, in the shopkeepers’ benevolence to dangle from conspicuous hooks, that people’s mouths might water gratis as they passed; there were piles of filberts, mossy and brown, recalling, in their fragrance, ancient walks among the woods, and pleasant shufflings ankle deep through withered leaves; there were Norfolk Biffins, squab and swarthy, setting off the yellow of the oranges and lemons, and, in the great compactness of their juicy persons, urgently entreating and beseeching to be carried home in paper bags and eaten after dinner. The very gold and silver fish, set forth among these choice fruits in a bowl, though members of a dull and stagnant-blooded race, appeared to know that there was something going on; and, to a fish, went gasping round and round their little world in slow and passionless excitement.
The Grocers’. oh the Grocers’. nearly closed, with perhaps two shutters down, or one; but through those gaps such glimpses. It was not alone that the scales descending on the counter made a merry sound, or that the twine and roller parted company so briskly, or that the canisters were rattled up and down like juggling tricks, or even that the blended scents of tea and coffee were so grateful to the nose, or even that the raisins were so plentiful and rare, the almonds so extremely white, the sticks of cinnamon so long and straight, the other spices so delicious, the candied fruits so caked and spotted with molten sugar as to make the coldest lookers-on feel faint and subsequently bilious. Nor was it that the figs were moist and pulpy, or that the French plums blushed in modest tartness from their highly-decorated boxes, or that everything was good to eat and in its Christmas dress; but the customers were all so hurried and so eager in the hopeful promise of the day, that they tumbled up against each other at the door, crashing their wicker baskets wildly, and left their purchases upon the counter, and came running back to fetch them, and committed hundreds of the like mistakes, in the best humour possible; while the Grocer and his people were so frank and fresh that the polished hearts with which they fastened their aprons behind might have been their own, worn outside for general inspection, and for Christmas daws to peck at if they chose.
8. Transported to London on Christmas morning
Actually ready—instead of resistant—to learn from the ghost, Scrooge lets himself be mysteriously transported to the streets of London on Christmas morning. It is a poor section of town with houses blackened with soot, dirty snow piled up under the newer snow, the air a “dingy mist,” and the unpaved roads “thick with yellow mud and icy water.”
The streets are packed with people bustling in every direction. Despite the grimy surroundings, the people are out to have as much fun as possible. People shoveling snow off their roofs occasionally toss a snowball at each other, “laughing heartily if it went right and not less heartily if it went wrong.” Even the food is animated—the fat shiny Spanish onions piled high in bins “wink” at the shoppers, and the lemons and oranges seem to be “urgently . . . beseeching to be carried home in paper bags and eaten after dinner.”
Up to this point in the story, the polarities established— miserliness and generosity, poverty and wealth, the upper and lower classes—are familiar concepts. Most readers in Dickens’s time were aware of these issues as well, and Dickens himself, as previously discussed, was not only devoted as a writer to dramatizing the plight of the poor, but at different times during his lifetime he considered taking other kinds of more overt action. The idea for A Christmas Carol came to him when he was especially caught up with these issues. The message of Carol associates Christmas explicitly and powerfully with a spirit of benevolence that would be necessary to inspire new legislation. Many Dickens scholars believe that Dickens’s purpose in writing his story was ideological. He wanted everyone to internalize this spirit of benevolence, this Christmas message, and to use its power against the seemingly intractable problem (for the Victorians, no less so for our own time) of the split between the haves and have nots.
It would not be inconsistent with Dickens’s purposes to question the efficacy of the Christmas spirit in addressing these issues or ameliorating the terrible conditions of poverty Dickens was portraying for his readers. Moral exhortations directed toward the middle classes to be materially generous to the working classes certainly relieved real suffering, but once Christmas passed and the goodwill incentives waned, the same conditions returned to keep the economic disparities intact. Implied in the messages to the middle classes was a measure of congratulation for being in the middle class in the first place. Some of the details of this dilemma come into focus in the scene in which Scrooge and the ghost are watching the people on the crowded streets of London going urgently to and fro, caught between the need to get their dinners (in this case their Christmas dinners) prepared for them by the bakers—a right granted the poor one day a week—and the obligation to heed the summons of the bells on Christmas Day and get themselves to church.
But soon the steeples called good people all, to church and chapel, and away they came, flocking through the streets in their best clothes, and with their gayest faces. And at the same time there emerged from scores of bye-streets, lanes, and nameless turnings, innumerable people, carrying their dinners to the baker’ shops. The sight of these poor revellers appeared to interest the Spirit very much, for he stood with Scrooge beside him in a baker’s doorway, and taking off the covers as their bearers passed, sprinkled incense on their dinners from his torch. And it was a very uncommon kind of torch, for once or twice when there were angry words between some dinner-carriers who had jostled each other, he shed a few drops of water on them from it, and their good humour was restored directly. For they said, it was a shame to quarrel upon Christmas Day. And so it was. God love it, so it was.
9. This spirit is different
Seemingly Dickens sets this Christmas Day on a Sunday a holy day of the year on a holy day of the week
Originally, Dickens wrote that the Spirit sprinkled “fire,” before changing it to the more contextually significant “incense”—this Spirit blesses these lowly people with the same gift as the Magi blessed the lowly Christ child.
Unlike the first and third Spirits, the Present Spirit helps not only Scrooge, but others in need as well, thereby setting an example to the “present spirit” in us
In time the bells ceased, and the bakers were shut up; and yet there was a genial shadowing forth of all these dinners and the progress of their cooking, in the thawed blotch of wet above each baker’s oven; where the pavement smoked as if its stones were cooking too.
‘Is there a peculiar flavour in what you sprinkle from your torch.’ asked Scrooge.
‘There is. My own.’
‘Would it apply to any kind of dinner on this day.’ asked Scrooge.
‘To any kindly given. To a poor one most.’
‘Why to a poor one most.’ asked Scrooge.
‘Because it needs it most.’
‘Spirit,’ said Scrooge, after a moment’s thought,’ I wonder you, of all the beings in the many worlds about us, should desire to cramp these people’s opportunities of innocent enjoyment.’
‘I.’ cried the Spirit.
‘You would deprive them of their means of dining every seventh day, often the only day on which they can be said to dine at all,’ said Scrooge. ‘Wouldn’t you.’
‘I.’ cried the Spirit.
‘You seek to close these places on the Seventh Day.’ said Scrooge. ‘And it comes to the same thing.’
‘I seek.’ exclaimed the Spirit.
‘Forgive me if I am wrong. It has been done in your name, or at least in that of your family,’ said Scrooge.
‘There are some upon this earth of yours,’ returned the Spirit,’ who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.’
10. Dickens and the bakers
On Sundays because bakers were forbidden by law to bake then. Dickens objected to the inequity writing in a pamphlet, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man to serve the Sabbath”—Christ’s words in Mark 2:27.
Scrooge is talking about so-called pious rich people of his day who wanted the bakeries closed on Sunday, which was the day of the week when poor people who had no stoves went to the bakeries to cook their dinners. They could use the ovens on Sundays because bakers were forbidden by law to bake then. Dickens objected to the inequity writing in a pamphlet, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man to serve the Sabbath”—Christ’s words in Mark 2:27.
Dickens criticizes the self-righteous people noted above—through one of the very heavenly host they claim to serve
The English law that prompts the confusion in the streets was known as Sabbatarianism, a religious movement that sought to limit or prevent both commercial and leisure activities on Sundays and religious holidays. Its purpose was to ensure that the working classes went to their places of worship. Scrooge’s moral conscience has been awakened just enough so far that he notices and is sensitive to the chaos imposed on the poor by having the sound of the bells’ summons overlap with the time the bakers kept their doors open for the poor. He challenges the spirit to explain why in its name these religious laws are allowed to keep the poor from their meals and their leisure.
The ghost has a satisfying answer—one that is familiar and still necessary a century and a half later: “There are some upon this earth of yours who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strangers to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.
Scrooge meets the Ghost of Christmas Present and visits the streets of London on Christmas morning.
“Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death.”
Holly according to a Christian tradition, symbolizes Christ: the pointed leaves suggest the crown of thorns, the red berries suggest the blood shed for our salvation and the green coloring suggests eternal life (or growth). One tradition even holds holly was used for the crown of thorns—similar to the head wreath the Spirit wears.
He is counting the years since the birth of Christ