Intro & context to Dickens' A Christmas Carol

1. The Victorian Experience

2.  When Dickens was nine,
his family moved to
London. At twelve, his
father was arrested and
sent to debtors' prison
 Dickens worked for 3
months at a blacking
warehouse.
 At age 25, Dickens
completed his first novel,
The Pickwick Papers.
Became a literary
celebrity

3.  Five Sections (‘Staves’)
 3 spirit guides
 Memory, Empathy, Moral
reckoning
 Allegory
 Parable
 Political comment
 1834 The new Poor Law ensured
that the poor were housed in
workhouses, clothed and fed.
Children who entered the
workhouse would receive some
schooling. All workhouse
paupers would have to work for
several hours each day. The
workhouse was a place of dread.

4.  In “A Christmas Tree” (1859), Dickens writes, “We are
telling Winter Stories–Ghost Stories...round the
Christmas fire.”
 ‘Now I remember those old women’s words
Who in my wealth would tell me winter’s tales
And speak of spirits and ghosts that glide by night’
(Marlowe, The Jew of Malta 1589 )
 “A sad tale’s best for winter; I have one/Of sprites and
goblins.” (Shakespeare, A Winter’s Tale, 1623)
 Robert Louis Stevenson, The Master of Ballantrae: A
Winter’s Tale (1889). “He’s not of this world “.

5.  For a penny, Dickens
told his biographer
John Forster, he could
frighten the wits out of
his head, ‘which,
considering that there
was an illustration to
every number in which
there was always a pool
of blood, and at least
one body, was cheap’

6.  Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Rhoda Broughton, Wilkie
Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth
Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Sheridan Le Fanu,
Rosa Mulholland, Margaret Oliphant, Mrs Henry Wood all
wrote ghost stories
 Concern/ Curiosity with death and the afterlife
 the material world they inhabited often seemed somehow
supernatural. Disembodied voices over the telephone, the
superhuman speed of the railway, near instantaneous
communication through telegraph wires: the collapsing of
time and distance by modern technologies that were
transforming daily life was often felt to be uncanny.
 As Dickens showed in "The Signalman", the railway seemed
a haunted place no sooner than the tracks had been laid.

7.  In "Well Authenticated Rappings", a satirical skit he
wrote for Household Words in 1858, a voice in the
narrator’s head turns out to be a Boxing Day hangover:
‘on that memorable
morning, at about two hours after daylight, the writer,
starting up in bed with his hand to his forehead,
distinctly felt seventeen heavy throbs or beats in that
region. They were accompanied by a feeling of pain in
the locality, and by a general sensation not unlike that
which is usually attendant on biliousness...’
 However his own readings brought charges of hysteria

8.  the ‘Hidden soul’: ‘It is in
the hidden sphere of
thought, even more than
in the open one, that we
live and move and have
our being’.
 Dickens owned a signed
copy

9.  Named for its creator, Anton Mesmer, mesmerism was
the belief that the universe was full of an invisible
magnetic fluid, which influenced all life and could be
manipulated more easily with magnets. also known as
magnetism and animal magnetism.
 Peaking in the 1840s and 1850s, mesmerism probed the
mind’s latent capacities, and its stimulated trances
contributed to James Braid’s definition of hypnotism
as a means of diagnosing and treating nervous
complaints that would become central to the analysis
of hysteria and traumatic neurosis in the 1880s and
1890s.

10.  Dickens actually became a
practicing mesmeric doctor,
successfully putting both his wife
and sister-in-law into a trance.
 During his family’s trip to Italy in
1844, Dickens also mesmerized
the alluring Augusta de la Rue. In
addition to a “burning and
raging” in her head, Augusta told
Dickens, she was often rattled by
images of a mysterious figure—a
“Phantom” who haunted her
thoughts and dreams.

11.  In the 1860s, Spiritualism
became part of Victorian
subculture with its
mediums, specialist
newspapers, pamphlets,
treatises, societies, private
and public séances which
included table rapping,
table tipping, automatic
writing, levitation, and
other communications
with spirits.
 Spiritualist societies were
established in Great
Britain, such as The
Spiritualist Association of
Great Britain (1872), The
British National
Association of Spiritualists
(1873), The National
Spiritualists' Federation
(1890), and The
Spiritualists' National
Union (1901).

12.  In “Well Authenticated
Rappings,” (Household
Words, 1858), Dickens
questions why spirits
would return to
communicate with the
living, only to make
idiots of themselves by
tapping out banal
messages rife with
orthographical mistakes.

13.  ‘“It is required of every man
that the spirit within him
should walk abroad among
his fellow-men, and travel far
and wide; and if that spirit
goes not forth in life, it is
condemned to do so after
death. It is doomed to wander
through the world – oh, woe
is me! – and witness what it
cannot share, but might have
shared on earth, and turned
to happiness! “ (Marley)
 Ghosts provide a moral
awakening

14.  The appearance of a
ghost especially in
Dickens superimposes
the order of
chronological time with
the freedom of narrative
time
 In Russian formalism,
Syuzhet is an
employment of narrative
and fabula is the
chronological order.
 Dickens experiments
with narrative time. He
suggests that time can be
viewed as circular as well
as linear, esp Christmas

15.  ‘How many old recollections, and how many dormant
sympathies, does Christmas time awaken!We write these words
now, many miles distant from the spot at which, year after year,
we met on that day, a merry and joyous circle. Many of the hearts
that throbbed so gaily then, have ceased to beat; many of the
looks that shone so brightly then, have ceased to glow; the hands
we grasped, have grown cold; the eyes we sought, have hid their
lustre in the grave; and yet the old house, the room, the merry
voices and smiling faces, the jest, the laugh, the most minute
and trivial circumstances connected with those happy meetings,
crowd upon our mind at each recurrence of the season, as if the
last assemblage had been but yesterday! Happy, happy
Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childish
days; that can recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth;
that can transport the sailor and the traveller, thousands of miles
away, back to his own fireside and his quiet home!’

16.  "the Carol philosophy"
 The Chimes (1844) the spirits of the bells and their
goblin attendants who reprimand ‘Trotty’ for losing
faith in man's destiny to improve
 The Cricket on the Hearth 1845 A mysterious lodger
and the Scrooge-like miser Mr. Tackleton
 The Battle of Life: A Love Story 1846 (no
supernatural/ religious elements)
 The Haunted Man 1848…(worth reading!)
 Subsequent stories in All the Year Round e.g. 1861
‘Four Ghost Stories’

17.  "an awful likeness of
himself...with his
features, and his bright
eyes, and his grizzled
hair, and dressed in the
gloomy shadow of his
dress..."
 ‘the intertwisted chain
of feelings and
associations, each in its
turn dependent on, and
nourished by, the
banished recollection’
 Memory directly affects
personality

18.  Phineas Gage 1848, US -traumatic
brain injury – personality changes.
decision-making and social
cognition are largely dependent
upon the frontal lobes
 1865 Dickens was involved in a train
crash of the kind that stimulated a
widespread discussion of the
delayed mental effects of accidents
that would contribute to the concept
of trauma as the meeting place of
body and mind in the work of Pierre
Janet and Sigmund Freud in the
1890s

19.  Five days after his death in 1870,
his spirit ‘appeared’ at a séance
in America. It returned
frequently over the decades that
followed, usually to propose an
ending for his unfinished novel,
The Mystery of Edwin Drood. For
example, in 1873, printer Thomas
James penned an ending for the
book. He claimed that Dickens
had dictated the ending from
beyond the grave, calling the
book The Mystery of Edwin
Drood (Complete). Part second
of The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
By the spirit-pen of Charles
Dickens, through a medium.