332 Dickens, Charles
deatH in A Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol begins with
these simple words: “Marley was dead: to begin
with.” This is a strange beginning for a story about
Christmas, but understanding death, or the threat
of death, is vital to understanding Dickens’s ideas
about life.
The theme of death is first represented by the
presence of Jacob Marley’s ghost, and later by the
presence of three spirits. The impending death
of the young and wholly innocent Tiny Tim and
the fear Scrooge has of his own death also figure
importantly in what will ultimately be Scrooge’s
transformation. His encounters with death and
the dead cause him to understand and respect the
responsibility human beings have for one another.
The complete title of Dickens’s story is A Christ-
mas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas.
Ghost stories were particularly popular in Victorian
times and became part of the culture of the period.
They developed from the gothic tale of terror but
used more familiar settings and everyday situations
to make the terror more credible. In the case of A
Christmas Carol, Dickens sets an eerie scene with
his descriptions of darkness, fog, and frost, in the
weather and in Scrooge’s heart. It seems as if noth-
ing lives in Scrooge; he is alone and he has left every
kind of relationship to die. The weather will change
only in the last chapter, after Scrooge’s redemption.
Ghosts are used to help the main character
understand that every man is the same, that there
should be no class barriers and that the poor are
people, too. The first one is Marley’s Ghost, who
carries the story’s main message and represents
humankind’s conscience: He speaks to Scrooge, but
he refers to everybody. The second is the Ghost of
Christmas Past, who shows how experiences make
us who and what we are. The Ghost of Christmas
Present demonstrates how many opportunities there
are to care for the less fortunate, while the Ghost of
Christmas Yet to Come shows our fear of the future.
The feared death of Tiny Tim is the one that
touches the heart more than any other, and it is the
one that makes Scrooge change definitively. In the
19th century, the child mortality rate was very high,
and many of the original readers of this story might
have suffered firsthand the loss of a child. Tiny
Tim’s possible death is in contrast with Scrooge’s.
The boy’s short life will be mourned; he has brought
much joy to those around him and he will be missed
intensely. The man, on the other hand, will be
missed by no one. In fact, the only people who will
feel emotion at all upon his passing are his debt-
ors, happy of the event that makes them free from
their debt. He can’t believe that “he lay, in the dark
empty house, with not a man, a woman, or a child,
to say he was kind to me in this or that, and for the
memory of one kind word I will be kind to him.” He
asks the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come to show
him tenderness connected with a death. The spirit
brings him to Bob Cratchit’s house and lets him
understand that the young and good Tim could die
and that that occasion will be a tragedy for all. This
prediction is the catalyst by which Scrooge changes.
He fears the death of Tiny Tim and his own solitary
death. He decides to honor Christmas and be a good
man every day of the year, thinking about his less
fortunate fellow men, helping Bob Cratchit’s fam-
ily by giving a good wage to Bob and becoming a
second father to Tiny Tim.
Raffaella Cavalieriindividual and sOciety in A Christmas
Carol
An important theme in A Christmas Carol is the
exploitation of the poor and children. The Victorian
age was an era of technological progress but also one
of extreme poverty and exploitation of factory work-
ers. Men, women, and children worked in factories
sometimes up to 16 hours a day, while the factory
owners paid them very low wages. The gulf separat-
ing the rich from the poor was so deep that many
contemporary novelists criticized the desperate situ-
ation of the working classes in their novels. Charles
Dickens was perhaps the best-known example. At
the age of 12, he was withdrawn from school and
sent to work in a blacking factory in London to help
his father, who had been imprisoned for debt. This
experience lasted only a few months, but it influ-
enced Dickens’s whole life, establishing his identifi-
cation with the poor and oppressed and making him
a consistent critic of these kinds of injustices.
In A Christmas Carol in particular, Dickens wrote
about economic disparity, love for fellow humans,