Dickens’s Haunted Christmas: The Ethics of the Spectral Text
By Brad Fruhauff
Forum: University of Edinburgh Post-Graduate Journal of Culture and the Arts, Vol.7 (2008)
Introduction: Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge’s name was good upon ’Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
The famous beginning to perhaps the most famous ghost story in the Anglophone world insists first upon the distinct line between life and death. 1 Marley was dead, and his death had been witnessed by representatives of the religious, legal, social and business worlds—especially the business world, for the almost absolute authority conferred on Scrooge by his economic status (his choice, his hand) is especially emphasized. The categorical and metaphysical differentiation of life and death defines the field in which the following story will unfold. That Marley was dead, we are told, “must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate”. There is nothing surprising in a ghost story wishing to establish clear delineations between the worlds of the living and the dead; in fact, the genre requires it and we, as readers, presuppose it. This particular introduction, then, initiates and invites us into the tale’s ghostly world, prepares us for its hauntings.
Of course, the question of haunting itself has its own interest, but one might also wonder why a Christmas story should be at all haunted. While some connection between Christmas, winter and the supernatural can be traced back through Shakespeare and no doubt beyond, Dickens seems especially interested in the manifestation of ghosts and phantoms at Christmastime. Indeed, by publishing his own and many others’ seasonal ghost stories in his magazines, Household Words and All the Year Round, he can be attributed with making the ghost story a sort of Victorian Christmas tradition. Moreover, in his Christmas tales, Dickens saw no contradiction in combining the Gothic effects of ghost stories with sentimental scenes to present his religio-social message of charity, compassion and communal affection.
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