Background
(1843), painted during the period when he was writing
A Christmas Carol. By 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. Indeed, Dickens experienced poverty as a boy when he was forced to work in a blacking factory after his father's imprisonment for debt. 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. Dickens's friend
John Forster said that Dickens had “a hankering after ghosts” while not having a belief in them himself. His journals
Household Words and
All the Year Round regularly featured ghost stories, with the novelist publishing an annual ghost story for several years after his first,
A Christmas Carol, in 1843. 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. == Significance to the story ==
Significance to the story
The Ghost of Christmas Past is a strange, otherworldly creature that shimmers and flickers like a candlelight, constantly changing in appearance as it reflects Scrooge's memories, old and new. As one memory comes sharply into focus, another fades. As the Spirit represents Scrooge's youth so it can appear youthful, its skin is of the "tenderest bloom"; 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. 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: (1868). 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. 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. The arms were very long and muscular; the hands the same, as if its hold were of uncommon strength. Its legs and feet, most delicately formed, were, like those upper members, bare... 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. Even this, though, when Scrooge looked at it with increasing steadiness, was not its strangest quality. 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. And in the very wonder of this, it would be itself again; distinct and clear as ever. 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. Take heed!" The Spirit then shows Scrooge his subsequent painful parting from his fiancée Belle and a now-married Belle with her large, happy family on the Christmas Eve that Marley died. When Scrooge becomes upset by these memories, the Spirit says, "These are the shadows of the things that have been. That they are what they are, do not blame me." When Scrooge asks the ghost to remove him from the house, 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". Scrooge wrestles with the ghost, crying out, "Leave me! Take me back. Haunt me no longer!" and seizes the Spirit's cap. "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." == Notable portrayals ==