46 THE FAITHFUL READER of Christmas, “a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time” when shut-up hearts are opened to let in the light of kindness and reflect it back again. Not Birth But Death Despite its long association with Christmas, Dickens’s tale begins not with a birth, but with a death—the death of Old Marley, Scrooge’s former business partner. In fact, death underlies the entire story: it casts a shadow over Scrooge’s bygone memories; it lurks behind the festoons of present revelry; it awaits its inevitable victims in the future. Scrooge is aware of death, certainly. He even recommends it to the poor as a means of relieving the surplus population. But it is clear that he has never thought about it as applicable or relevant to himself. That begins to change when he is confronted by the ghost of the departed Marley, who appears to Scrooge to make him accept death and the consequences of death—to warn him to turn from the dismal road he walks or suffer eternal punishments. Bound in the trappings of death and torment, he comes to offer Scrooge “a chance and hope” of escaping his own dreadful fate. “You will be haunted by Three Spirits,” Marley tells Scrooge. The Spirits show him many things, but what they collectively reveal is Scrooge’s progressing separation from his fellow man. Still, Scrooge is not wholly lost. Small regrets begin to well up in him early in the course of the spectral visitations. The Spirits know their business, fanning these embers of remorse into flames of repentance. But it is the third Spirit, so frightful in aspect that he is referred to as a “Phantom,” who brings Scrooge to his knees, pleading for the chance to mend his ways. This Spirit is the revelation of death. The visions presided over by this menacing apparition, who provides not even the comforts of speech, are unrelieved by either the sweetness of recollection or glimpses of present joy. Scrooge is brought face to face with his own death, his final separation from the world. But it is not merely his death, but especially the kind of death that shakes Scrooge: a death un-mourned and even celebrated; a death that reveals the utter emptiness and selfishness of his life. The result of Scrooge’s supernatural experiences is that he is reborn a good man. He begins immediately to reform, to show compassion and
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTM4ODY=