a christmas carol summary of stave 2

A Christmas Carol

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A Christmas Carol

Stave 2 summary & analysis, charles dickens.

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Introduction
Summary Main
Themes Main
Compassion and Forgiveness
Transformation
Philosophical Viewpoints: Rationality
Memory and the Past
Guilt and Blame
Characters Main
Ebenezer Scrooge
Bob Cratchit
Tiny Tim Cratchit
Ghost of Christmas Past
Ghost of Christmas Present
Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come
Jacob Marley
Analysis Main
What's Up With the Title?
What's Up With the Ending?
Tough-o-Meter
Writing Style
Marley's Chains
Scrooge's Gravestone
Scrooge's Bed
Narrator Point of View
Booker's Seven Basic Plots Analysis
Plot Analysis
Three-Act Plot Analysis
Quotes Main
For Teachers

A Christmas Carol Stave 2

By charles dickens, the first of the three spirits.

Scrooge wakes up and starts freaking out because the clock makes it seem like he slept straight through the next day… but, you know, once you start messing around with ghosts and stuff, the clock is the least of your problems.
Scrooge goes over the whole thing with Marley in his head and decides it was probably a crazy dream. Which—um, spoiler alert—not really.
Suddenly, the clock strikes one, the curtains of his bed are pulled open, and he sees… a ghost that looks like a cross between a tiny old man and a child. (Oh, just a little Shmooptastic FYI here: back in the day, they had four-post beds for a reason—there were curtains going from post to post that you would pull closed to sleep. So those are the curtains that we're talking about here.)
So. The kid/grandpa ghost is crazy looking, sometimes with twenty legs, sometimes with no head. It also is very, very bright, but carries with it a huge version of an old-timey metal candle-extinguisher (basically, a little cone-shaped thing that you would put over a candle to cut off the evaporated candle wax fumes that make the fire go in order to put it out).
It claims to be the Ghost of Christmas Past, and takes Scrooge off for a walk through the wall. Scrooge is all, um, that's not going to fly for me, buddy, but the ghost magics him into being transmutable. Sweet .
Off they go.
First stop? Scrooge's totally depressing childhood, spent all alone in a school where every other kid is off for Christmas break with the family.
(Before we go on, we have to point out something here. Scrooge starts to break down pretty much immediately from this point on. Like, there is almost no effort required on the part of the ghosts to get him to own up to being a jerk. Almost every modern adaptation of the whole Scrooge-and-the-three-ghosts archetype that follows this one—and there are many, so check out Shmoop's " Best of the Web " section for some cool ones—tries to draw out this process a bit more. So it's always a little shocking to re-read the original and see that Scrooge gives in to the lesson-learning with no resistance at all.)
Back to the story.
Scrooge starts to sob hysterically at the sight of himself as a little boy reading a bunch of fantasy books. (Oh, and did you notice that he reads pretty much only adventure stories? That's pretty at odds with his hyper-rational self in the present. Dickens, by the way, was way against rationalism.)
Not only does he cry, but also he immediately fesses up to the kid/grandpa ghost that he should really have shelled out some coin to that caroling kid from earlier in the evening.
But it's time to get back on the love train , oops we mean the ghost train. Stop number two is another one of these Christmas-vacation-spent-at-school days. This time, though, Scrooge's little sister comes to bring him home. Her big news is that their dad has for some reason gotten way nicer and so little Ebenezer is allowed to come back home for good.
(Wait, what? Yeah, no kidding. None of this is filled in beyond what we're telling you here—why on earth he was sent away in the first place, what was the matter with crazy old dad, why the sister was allowed to stay behind, and what changed? Apparently doesn't matter when you're trying to crank this thing out to get it published before the Christmas deadline.)
Anyway, we learn that the sister is dead now, but that Scrooge's nephew is her son. Which… doesn't really tell us anything that the word "nephew" didn't already convey, but, you know, clearly this is more important than the whole our-dad-was-way-crazy-but-let's-just-gloss-right-over-that-shall-we situation.
So, fine then, dead sister, got it.
Now, it's on to stop number three, where Scrooge remembers how awesomely he partied that one Christmas at the house of his master Fezziwig with his BFF and fellow apprentice, Dick Wilkins. Dudes, that party was totally off the hook!
Also, it's the first nice Christmas scene we've gotten so far—the point being that just for a few bucks, Mr. and Mrs. Fezziwig make a whole bunch of neighborhood apprentice kids happy for a few hours and are then remembered with affection forever. Or something like that.
Scrooge immediately gets the point of this. By contrast he's been kind of a jerko to his own clerk. He's really pretty quick on the uptake, no?
On to the next glimpse into the past: the Christmas when Scrooge really starts turning into the greedy old hobgoblin we know and love.
In the scene, a slightly older Scrooge sits with his fiancée who straight up accuses him of loving money more than her. He's all, "Um, but I can still love you second-best, right? And also, money is really totally important!" But she is not having it, and breaks off the engagement. He doesn't really argue.
Finally, one last thingie from the Ghost of Christmas Past, which turns out to be basically the Dickensian equivalent of Beyoncé's "if you liked it then you should have put a ring on it."
The ex-fiancée is now sitting in the middle of her huge family, with a whole bunch of kids happily running around, and a husband who totally loves her and them and is just completely the kind of Prince Charming that Scrooge would never have been. The happiness is so absolute that it's a little suspicious. Or maybe Shmoop's just getting cynical in its old age.
Anyway, just like that, these super happy people just happen to mention crazy old Scrooge, who the husband says is all alone, now that Marley is on the verge of death. Wow, what a coincidence that they would just happen to talk about him right then!
Scrooge can't take any more of this all of a sudden. He grabs the extinguisher cap thing and tries to smother the kid/grandpa ghost with it. Wow, that's like Chekhov's gun ! You just knew that thing was going to be used at some point as soon as Dickens described it when the ghost first showed up.
The ghost kind of melts into the floorboards and Scrooge falls asleep, which is clearly his go-to method of coping with a crisis. We prefer chocolate.

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A Christmas Carol Stave 2 Summary

Scrooge awoke to find that even though he had gone to bed after two o'clock in the morning, it was somehow twelve. It seemed as though no time had passed, but in fact time had somehow gone in reverse. He realized the first apparition was scheduled to appear at one, so he sat up anxiously waiting for the bell to toll. When it did, his visitor appeared, right on schedule, looking young and literally glowing from a light that shone out of the top of its head. The spirit announced, "I am the Ghost of Christmas Past." Scrooge asked what that meant, and the ghost responded that it referred to Scrooge's past, then asked Scrooge to stand and follow. The ghost led Scrooge to the window, which Scrooge was afraid to step out of. The spirit assured Scrooge that touching the spirit's heart would allow Scrooge to travel safely along.

They magically journeyed to the place where Scrooge grew up. He was flooded with memories, which made him cry. He saw the school that he attended and remembered being left alone there. They then appeared before a large house where Scrooge had lived while at boarding school. Scrooge saw himself alone on Christmas reading the book Robinson Crusoe , and suddenly the characters seemed to come alive before him. It made Scrooge think of the boy who had come caroling at his house, and how perhaps he could have shared such a book with him.

Once again the scene magically transformed to a later Christmas at the same boarding house when Scrooge's sister ran in to tell him their father had decided that Scrooge could come home. Then time jumped again to the warehouse where Scrooge was an apprentice. His boss, Fezziwig, told him to pack up early because it was Christmas. Then the Fezziwigs proceeded to throw a tremendous party for all their friends and family where Scrooge enjoyed drinking and dancing. The ghost pointed out that it didn't cost the Fezziwigs much to make the people they knew so happy. It made Scrooge think of his own clerk, wishing he could talk to him at that moment.

They then jumped ahead in time to a conversation he had with a young girl. Clearly, he had once expressed feelings for this girl when they were both young and poor, but as his ambitions and wealth grew, the girl could see that she was no longer enough for him, still poor and without a dowry. Therefore, she released him from their contract to one another. This memory upset Scrooge so much that he asked the spirit to stop, but the spirit forced him to view one more scene. This time Scrooge was looking upon that same young girl who had become a mother and was in her house surrounded by many children. Her husband came home bearing Christmas presents, which caused all the children to rejoice and celebrate. Once they'd gone to bed, he told his wife how he had caught a glimpse of Scrooge earlier that day through his shop window, all alone. Scrooge couldn't stand to hear another word, and begged the spirit to make it stop. The spirit put a cap on, extinguishing much of the light coming from its head and as Scrooge pushed down the cap to put out the light, he found himself back in his bedroom and softly fell asleep.

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A Christmas Carol: Novel Summary
A Christmas Carol: Novel Summary: Stave 1

A Christmas Carol: Novel Summary: Stave 2

A Christmas Carol: Novel Summary: Stave 3
A Christmas Carol: Novel Summary: Stave 4
A Christmas Carol: Novel Summary: Stave 5
A Christmas Carol: Metaphor Analysis
A Christmas Carol: Theme Analysis
A Christmas Carol: Top Ten Quotes
A Christmas Carol: Biography: Charles Dickens

Stave Two: "The First of the Three Spirits" Scrooge awakens in the night and at first thinks he has slept either through an entire day: nearby church bells are striking twelve, and Scrooge had gone to bed after two in the morning. Confused, Scrooge reflects on his meeting with Marley's Ghost. He cannot decide whether the experience was real. As if to test his earlier hypothesis that the entire encounter was "humbug," Scrooge stays awake until the hour of one o'clock, when Marley had claimed that the first of three spirits would arrive. Just prior to the striking of the chimes, Scrooge is convinced that nothing will happen. As soon as the hour of one sounds, however, lights flash in his room and a hand draws the curtains from around his bed.

This strong hand belongs to a delicately-built being who is like both a child and an old man, with long white hair and no blemish of age on its face. The figure has bare arms and legs but wears a white tunic and shining belt, and carries "a branch of fresh, green holly," even though the being's garb is "trimmed with summer flowers." A "bright, clear jet of light" springs from the figure's head; Scrooge surmises that the large cap under the figure's arm serves at times as "a great extinguisher." The figure is the Ghost of Christmas Past. While Dickens refers to this being as the first of three "spirits," the term "ghost" must now be understood as a synonym-not, as in the previous chapter, the word with which we are familiar, an immortal soul haunting the world of the living. Archaic usage of the term "ghost" to mean "spirit" can still be found in the Christian liturgy with which Dickens and his Victorian society would have been familiar: e.g., naming the Persons of the Trinity as "the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost."

The physical details with which Dickens describes the Ghost of Christmas Past are evocative. If the Ghost is taken as an embodiment of the "spirit," or essence, of past Christmases, its indeterminate age suggests that experiences from childhood can, if we allow them to do so, remain with us well into maturity. This suggestion will prove to be one important lesson Scrooge must learn in order to find redemption. Further, these memories can light our way into adulthood; even as they shape the people we become, they summon us to keep them alive in the present. The presence of the "wintry emblem" of holly alongside "summer flowers" reinforces this analysis. For the purposes of Dickens' tale, memories of Christmas in particular are not to be packed away when the holiday passes; rather, they are to be allowed to blossom throughout the year and throughout our lives.

Scrooge asks if this mysterious figure is the first of the three spirits whom Marley told him to expect. The Ghost responds, "I am!," in a voice the narrator notes is "singularly low, as if instead of being so close beside [Scrooge], it were at a distance." This seemingly trivial detail actually illustrates the "distance" at which Scrooge has kept the memories of his past. Further evidence of this distance appears when Scrooge asks the Ghost if the "Christmas Past" of its name refers to the "[l]ong past"-in other words, a generic past, an ancient past with little to no bearing on Scrooge himself. The Ghost does not allow Scrooge to cling to this misconception: "No. Your past." The direct response puts Scrooge on notice: even though, as readers will see, he will not be able to interact with the people whom the Ghosts show him, Scrooge cannot remain detached from them. The way in which Scrooge keeps himself at a distance from his "fellow-passengers to the grave" (see Scrooge's conversation with his nephew in Stave One) will not be allowed to stand. Scrooge's redemption-or, to use the Ghost's word, his "reclamation"-will depend upon his reintegration with the rest of the human race.

Scrooge feels an inexplicable desire to have the Ghost cover its light-filled head. The Ghost reacts to this suggestion with vehement disapproval: "What! Would you so soon put out, with worldly hands, the light I give? Is it not enough that you are one of those whose passions made this cap, and force me through whole trains of years to wear it low upon my brow?" To this point in the book, readers have not seen Scrooge particularly passionate about anything, save his money. It seems to be exactly this passion to which the Ghost refers. Scrooge's obsession with earning money in his present has obscured the light shining from the valuable lessons to be learned from his past. (See again the description of the Ghost's physical appearance two paragraphs previously.)

The Ghost commands Scrooge to rise and follow. Scrooge, seeing that the Ghost intends to lead him through the same window by which Marley exited earlier, protests that he will fall. The Ghost assures him that, should Scrooge "bear but a touch of my hand" upon his heart, he will be "upheld in more than this." Once more, Dickens is symbolizing the function the past may play in our lives, and issues a warning about the perils of forgetting it ("bonneting" it, as Scrooge, albeit unconsciously, has done to the Ghost).

Immediately, Scrooge finds himself in a country field. He recognizes the place: it is where he spent his childhood. An overwhelming flood of sensory connection with the place even brings a tremble to Scrooge's lip and a tear to his cheek-evidence that, in a moment, the past has become more alive to Scrooge than ever before. This moment marks a notable change in Scrooge. Recall that, in Stave One, Scrooge mentions Marley's death to the charitable solicitors, and even remarks that Marley died exactly seven years prior, on Christmas Eve itself. Yet the narrator tells us-and we can safely assume that he is a reliable source-that Scrooge gives no further thought to Marley until the strange apparitions at his lodgings begin. How remarkable that the same man who could spare no thought to his deceased business partner on the anniversary of his death now trembles and tears up when confronted with the memories of his youth! Clearly, Scrooge's transformation-first signaled with that unfinished "Humbug" at Stave One's close-is continuing at a rapid pace.

Scrooge and the Ghost walk to a small town. The sound of the villagers greeting each other with "Merry Christmas" makes Scrooge glad. The Ghost reminds Scrooge that the local school is not quite empty: one boy remains behind, by himself, not headed home for Christmas with his fellow students. Scrooge weeps to remember how he spent the holiday alone as a child in a school that cannot help but remind readers of both Scrooge's own counting house and apartment: "There was . . . a chilly bareness in the place, which associated itself somehow with too much getting up by candle-light, and not too much to eat." These suggestive details may lead readers to consider whether this adolescent experience of isolation destined Scrooge for his misanthropic and solitary later life, or whether he could have resolved to live differently as an adult. To what extent need our past determine our present and future? This question touches on the thematic heart of A Christmas Carol, and is a question with which all of its readers should wrestle.

Scrooge sees himself as a boy, passing the time alone by reading-and so we discover that Scrooge was not entirely alone, at least not in his imagination. He seems to see, physically, the colorful characters he encountered in literature; for example, Ali Baba (of The Arabian Nights, one of Dickens' own favorite books and one he connected with Christmas [Hearn 58]), and Robinson Crusoe and Friday (from the 1719 novel by Daniel Defoe which, by Dickens' day, had become a standard gift for boys at Christmas [Hearn 60]). Recall that in Stave One, the narrator informed us that Scrooge "had as little of what is called fancy about him as any man." In this touching scene, we learn that he was not always so. Seeing his former self, Scrooge feels empathy for the young boy who attempted to sing a Christmas carol at the counting house: "I should like to have given him something, that's all." In other words-to borrow language from that carol's absent, last stanza (see the discussion in Stave One)-he would have liked to "embrace" that boy "with true love and brotherhood."

The Ghost presents a vision of a later Christmas to Scrooge. Young Scrooge is still alone in the schoolhouse, which has grown darker and dirtier. This Christmas, however, Scrooge knows joy. His sister, Fan, arrives to bring him home. Fan tells Scrooge that their father has changed: "Father is so much kinder than he used to be, that home's like Heaven!" With this glimpse into the changed character of Scrooge's father, Dickens may be further preparing readers for the experience of Scrooge's similar transformation.

Fan announces that Scrooge's school days have ended; he "is to be a man" now. As if to symbolize this transition into adulthood, the schoolmaster-a figure Scrooge has up to this point feared (much as Scrooge's own clerk fears Scrooge)-offers Scrooge and Fan cake and wine. Although we can infer from the post-boy's rejection of the wine that the refreshments are perhaps not of the finest quality, the schoolmaster seems to offer them in the finest spirit: a spirit of generous celebration-qualities which mature Scrooge, of course, must recover in order to recover himself. Indeed, Scrooge's heart must grow to match his sister's. Based on the flow of the dialogue between the Ghost and Scrooge as this vision ends, readers could justifiably conclude that her "large heart" is the reason that Fan "died a woman." In other words, one-such as Scrooge-may grow to physical maturity, and still die as less than a full man or woman, since a large heart defines a full human being. The Ghost, somewhat impishly, forces Scrooge to acknowledge his nephew: the Ghost states that Fan left "children" behind when she died, and Scrooge must amend the plural form to the singular. The moment is small, but it seems to jolt Scrooge into recognizing that his nephew is his only remaining tie to Fan. Here, again, we see the "light" that the past can-if allowed to do so-shine on the present.

The Ghost now takes Scrooge to a city, bustling with activity as its residents prepare to celebrate Christmas. The Ghost asks Scrooge if he recognizes a particular warehouse. Scrooge does; it is the warehouse where he served as an apprentice to one Mr. Fezziwig. Scrooge watches in delight as Fezziwig instructs the young Scrooge and his fellow apprentice, Dick Wilkins, to stop their work and to prepare the warehouse for a holiday dance. It is at this point that readers first learn that Scrooge's first name is Ebenezer, a Hebrew word meaning "stone of help." In 1 Samuel 7:12, the prophet Samuel gives the name to a rock that commemorates an Israelite victory over their enemies the Philistines, saying, "Hitherto hath the LORD helped us" (KJV). While some readers have charged Dickens with anti-Semitism on the grounds that he gives miserly Scrooge a Hebrew name, the author need not necessarily have been drawing a stereotyped character. Given the book's central theme of redemption, Scrooge, when Christmas morning finally dawns, may find more meaning in his name than ever before!

Young Ebenezer and Dick quickly clear the warehouse floor, and soon a festive party fills the space. The narrator remarks that "the great effect of the evening" occurs when Fezziwig himself joins the festivities, dancing with his wife: "Top couple, too, with a good stiff piece of work cut out for them . . . people who were not to be trifled with; people who would dance, and had no notion of walking." The narrator states that a "positive light appear[s] to issue from Fezziwig's calves" as he dances-an image that might provoke snickers from some modern readers, but a significant detail, as it continues to develop the imagery of light in the book. The light which the past may shine on the present does not kindle itself; rather, it shines due to the goodwill and joy of people like Fezziwig.

The light proves contagious; as the party breaks up and the guests depart, we read a mention of "the bright faces of [Scrooge's] former self and Dick," and note that "the light upon [the Ghost's] head burned very clear." The Ghost seems to mock Fezziwig for his generosity, but, as before, it is provoking a self-incriminating reaction from Scrooge. When the Ghost asks whether Fezziwig's inexpensive celebration deserves to be praised, Scrooge insists that his praise of his former master is due, not to the amount of money Fezziwig spent on the party, but to the fact that Fezziwig chose to make his apprentices and all around him happy. As the Ghost surely intended, Scrooge's remarks make him wish he could "say a word or two" to his clerk. This Ghost's behavior, as well as that of the Ghost of Christmas Present, finds biblical precedent in the prophet Nathan's confrontation of King David, in which he goaded the king into confessing his own sin (see 2 Samuel 12). How appropriate that the Ghosts should resemble biblical prophets, who preached against hypocrisy and social injustice as did Dickens himself. No doubt Dickens intended A Christmas Carol to provoke in his readers an awareness of their own complicity in social sin, to recognize the "Scrooge" within themselves. Indeed, according to contemporary reports, people who read A Christmas Carol often immediately engaged in more charitable behavior than before, or with a new spirit. The book continued to have this effect even after Dickens' death; for instance, in 1874, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote to a friend that, after having read several of Dickens' Christmas stories, "I want to go out and comfort some one . . . . I shall give money; not that I haven't done so always, but I shall do it with a high hand now" (Hearn, p. xxxviii).

The Ghost presents Scrooge with another vision of the past, set still later in time. In this scene, Scrooge is "in the prime of his life," but his face already shows "signs of care and avarice." He sits with a young woman (here unnamed; compare the absence of name for the clerk and Scrooge's nephew in Stave One) who is dressed in mourning clothes; significantly, the tears in her eyes are illuminated by the light from the Ghost. She is mourning, not the death of a person, but the death of a relationship. We see, then, that he light of the past can expose not only the pleasant, but also the painful; Scrooge must see both if he is to be redeemed. The young woman accuses Scrooge of abandoning her for his love of money. She tells Scrooge that he is too afraid of the world, and that his fear has driven him to seek security by shedding his "nobler aspirations" in favor of greed. For his part, Scrooge sees his change only as a sign of wisdom. The girl insists that Scrooge is no longer the man with whom she fell in love, and "for the love of him you once were," she releases him from their betrothal. With the prediction that, one day, Scrooge will look back on their failed relationship as only "an unprofitable dream, from which it happened well that you awoke," his former fianc�e leaves Scrooge to the solitary, loveless life that he has chosen.

The Ghost then shows Scrooge a final vision. Scrooge is in the home of his former betrothed, who is now married with raucous, vivacious children of her own. He is witnessing the life that might have been his. The children's father arrives home, Christmas presents in hand. He tells his wife (whom we now learn is named Belle-the French word, of course, for "beauty") that he saw "an old friend" of hers: Scrooge, alone in his counting-house, seven years previously, as his partner Marley lay dying. "[T]here he sat alone," Belle's husband tells her. "Quite alone in the world, I do believe."

Scrooge reacts to this vision with hurt and anger. The Ghost reminds him, "That [these shadows of the past] are what they are, do not blame me!" Scrooge begins to wrestle with the Ghost, in whose face he now sees "fragments of all the faces it had shown him." Whether deliberately crafted to do so or not, the scene echoes Genesis 32:24-31, in which the biblical patriarch Jacob wrestles with a mysterious figure (variously interpreted as an angel or as God himself), and emerges from the struggle as a man with a new name, a new identity, and a blessing. The scene may foreshadow the blessing Scrooge will receive by the story's end for having wrestled with his past (and present, and future!). In the moment, however, Scrooge presses the Ghost's cap down upon its head with all his might, but "he could not hide the light." Having seen and understood his past for the first time in years, if not in his entire life, Scrooge cannot now go back to willful ignorance or denial of it. At the point of exhaustion, Scrooge falls asleep

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Charles Dickens (1812–1870)

24 A Christmas Carol: Stave 2

Charles Dickens

The First of the Three Spirits

To his great astonishment the heavy bell went on from six to seven, and from seven to eight, and regularly up to twelve; then stopped. Twelve! It was past two when he went to bed. The clock was wrong. An icicle must have got into the works. Twelve!

He touched the spring of his repeater [1] , to correct this most preposterous clock. Its rapid little pulse beat twelve: and stopped.

‘Why, it isn’t possible,’ said Scrooge, ‘that I can have slept through a whole day and far into another night. It isn’t possible that anything has happened to the sun, and this is twelve at noon!’

The idea being an alarming one, he scrambled out of bed, and groped his way to the window. He was obliged to rub the frost off with the sleeve of his dressing-gown before he could see anything; and could see very little then. All he could make out was, that it was still very foggy and extremely cold, and that there was no noise of people running to and to and fro, and making a great stir, as there unquestionably would have been if night had beaten off bright day, and taken possession of the world. This was a great relief, because “Three days after sight of this First of Exchange pay to Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge or his order,” and so forth, would have become a mere United States security [2] if there were no days to count by.

Scrooge went to bed again, and thought, and thought, and thought it over and over, and could make nothing of it. The more he thought, the more perplexed he was; and, the more he endeavoured not to think, the more he thought.

Marley’s Ghost bothered him exceedingly. Every time he resolved within himself, after mature inquiry, that it was all a dream, his mind flew back again, like a strong spring released, to its first position, and presented the same problem to be worked all through, ‘Was it a dream or not?’

Scrooge lay in this state until the chime had gone three quarters more, when he remembered, on a sudden, that the Ghost had warned him of a visitation when the bell tolled one. He resolved to lie awake until the hour was passed; and, considering that he could no more go to sleep than go to Heaven, this was, perhaps, the wisest resolution in his power.

The quarter was so long, that he was more than once convinced he must have sunk into a doze unconsciously, and missed the clock. At length it broke upon his listening ear.

‘Ding, dong!’

‘A quarter past,’ said Scrooge, counting.

‘Half-past!’ said Scrooge.

‘A quarter to it,’ said Scrooge.

‘The hour itself,’ said Scrooge triumphantly, ‘and nothing else!’

He spoke before the hour bell sounded, which it now did with a deep, dull, hollow, melancholy One. Light flashed up in the room upon the instant, and the curtains of his bed were drawn.

The curtains of his bed were drawn aside, I tell you, by a hand. Not the curtains at his feet, nor the curtains at his back, but those to which his face was addressed. The curtains of his bed were drawn aside; and Scrooge, starting up into a half-recumbent attitude, found himself face to face with the unearthly visitor who drew them: as close to it as I am now to you, and I am standing in the spirit at your elbow.

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. It wore a tunic of the purest white; and round its waist was bound a lustrous belt, the sheen of which was beautiful. It held a branch of fresh green holly in its hand; and, in singular contradiction of that wintry emblem, had its dress trimmed with summer flowers. 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 [3] 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.

‘Are you the Spirit, sir, whose coming was foretold to me?’ asked Scrooge.

The voice was soft and gentle. Singularly low, as if instead of being so close beside him, it were at a distance.

‘Who, and what are you?’ Scrooge demanded.

‘I am the Ghost of Christmas Past.’

‘Long Past?’ inquired Scrooge: observant of its dwarfish stature.

‘No. Your past.’

Perhaps, Scrooge could not have told anybody why, if anybody could have asked him; but he had a special desire to see the Spirit in his cap; and begged him to be covered.

‘What!’ exclaimed the Ghost, ‘would you so soon put out, with worldly hands, the light I give. Is it not enough that you are one of those whose passions made this cap, and force me through whole trains of years to wear it low upon my brow?’

Scrooge reverently disclaimed all intention to offend or any knowledge of having wilfully bonneted [4] the Spirit at any period of his life. He then made bold to inquire what business brought him there.

‘Your welfare!’ said the Ghost.

Scrooge expressed himself much obliged, but could not help thinking that a night of unbroken rest would have been more conducive to that end. The Spirit must have heard him thinking, for it said immediately:

‘Your reclamation, then. Take heed!’

It put out its strong hand as it spoke, and clasped him gently by the arm.

‘Rise! and walk with me!’

It would have been in vain for Scrooge to plead that the weather and the hour were not adapted to pedestrian purposes; that bed was warm, and the thermometer a long way below freezing; that he was clad but lightly in his slippers, dressing-gown, and nightcap; and that he had a cold upon him at that time. The grasp, though gentle as a woman’s hand, was not to be resisted. He rose: but finding that the Spirit made towards the window, clasped his robe in supplication.

‘I am mortal,’ Scrooge remonstrated, ‘and liable to fall.’

‘Bear but a touch of my hand there,’ said the Spirit, laying it upon his heart, ‘and you shall be upheld in more than this!’

As the words were spoken, they passed through the wall, and stood upon an open country road, with fields on either hand. The city had entirely vanished. Not a vestige of it was to be seen. The darkness and the mist had vanished with it, for it was a clear, cold, winter day, with snow upon the ground.

‘Good Heaven!’ said Scrooge, clasping his hands together, as he looked about him. ‘I was bred in this place. I was a boy here!’

The Spirit gazed upon him mildly. Its gentle touch, though it had been light and instantaneous, appeared still present to the old man’s sense of feeling. He was conscious of a thousand odours floating in the air, each one connected with a thousand thoughts, and hopes, and joys, and cares long, long, forgotten.

‘Your lip is trembling,’ said the Ghost. ‘And what is that upon your cheek?’

Scrooge muttered, with an unusual catching in his voice, that it was a pimple; and begged the Ghost to lead him where he would.

‘You recollect the way?’ inquired the Spirit.

‘Remember it!’ cried Scrooge with fervour; ‘ I could walk it blindfold.’

‘Strange to have forgotten it for so many years!’ observed the Ghost. ‘Let us go on.’

They walked along the road, Scrooge recognising every gate, and post, and tree; until a little market-town appeared in the distance, with its bridge, its church, and winding river. Some shaggy ponies now were seen trotting towards them with boys upon their backs, who called to other boys in country gigs and carts, driven by farmers. All these boys were in great spirits, and shouted to each other, until the broad fields were so full of merry music, that the crisp air laughed to hear it.

‘These are but shadows of the things that have been,’ said the Ghost. ‘They have no consciousness of us.’

The jocund travellers came on; and as they came, Scrooge knew and named them every one. Why was he rejoiced beyond all bounds to see them? Why did his cold eye glisten, and his heart leap up as they went past? Why was he filled with gladness when he heard them give each other Merry Christmas, as they parted at cross-roads and bye-ways, for their several homes? What was merry Christmas to Scrooge? Out upon merry Christmas! What good had it ever done to him?

‘The school is not quite deserted,’ said the Ghost. ‘A solitary child, neglected by his friends, is left there still.’

Scrooge said he knew it. And he sobbed.

They left the high-road, by a well-remembered lane, and soon approached a mansion of dull red brick, with a little weathercock-surmounted cupola, on the roof, and a bell hanging in it. It was a large house, but one of broken fortunes; for the spacious offices were little used, their walls were damp and mossy, their windows broken, and their gates decayed. Fowls clucked and strutted in the stables; and the coach-houses and sheds were over-run with grass. Nor was it more retentive of its ancient state, within; for entering the dreary hall, and glancing through the open doors of many rooms, they found them poorly furnished, cold, and vast. There was an earthy savour in the air, a chilly bareness in the place, which associated itself somehow with too much getting up by candle-light, and not too much to eat.

They went, the Ghost and Scrooge, across the hall, to a door at the back of the house. It opened before them, and disclosed a long, bare, melancholy room, made barer still by lines of plain deal forms and desks. At one of these a lonely boy was reading near a feeble fire; and Scrooge sat down upon a form, and wept to see his poor forgotten self as he used to be.

Not a latent echo in the house, not a squeak and scuffle from the mice behind the panelling, not a drip from the half-thawed water-spout in the dull yard behind, not a sigh among the leafless boughs of one despondent poplar, not the idle swinging of an empty store-house door, no, not a clicking in the fire, but fell upon the heart of Scrooge with a softening influence, and gave a freer passage to his tears.

The Spirit touched him on the arm, and pointed to his younger self, intent upon his reading. Suddenly a man, in foreign garments: wonderfully real and distinct to look at: stood outside the window, with an axe stuck in his belt, and leading by the bridle an ass laden with wood.

‘Why, it’s Ali Baba [5] !’ Scrooge exclaimed in ecstasy. ‘It’s dear old honest Ali Baba! Yes, yes, I know. One Christmas time, when yonder solitary child was left here all alone, he did come, for the first time, just like that. Poor boy! And Valentine,’ said Scrooge, ‘and his wild brother, Orson [6] ; there they go! And what’s his name, who was put down in his drawers, asleep, at the Gate of Damascus; don’t you see him? And the Sultan’s Groom turned upside down by the Genii; there he is upon his head! Serve him right! I’m glad of it. What business had he to be married to the Princess? [7] ’

To hear Scrooge expending all the earnestness of his nature on such subjects, in a most extraordinary voice between laughing and crying; and to see his heightened and excited face; would have been a surprise to his business friends in the city, indeed.

‘There’s the Parrot!’ cried Scrooge. ‘Green body and yellow tail, with a thing like a lettuce growing out of the top of his head; there he is! Poor Robin Crusoe, he called him, when he came home again after sailing round the island. ‘Poor Robin Crusoe, where have you been, Robin Crusoe?’ The man thought he was dreaming, but he wasn’t. It was the Parrot, you know. There goes Friday, running for his life to the little creek! Halloa! Hoop! Hallo!’

Then, with a rapidity of transition very foreign to his usual character, he said, in pity for his former self, ‘Poor boy!’ and cried again.

‘I wish,’ Scrooge muttered, putting his hand in his pocket, and looking about him, after drying his eyes with his cuff: ‘but it’s too late now.’

‘What is the matter?’ asked the Spirit.

‘Nothing,’ said Scrooge. ‘Nothing. There was a boy singing a Christmas Carol at my door last night. I should like to have given him something: that’s all.’

The Ghost smiled thoughtfully, and waved its hand: saying as it did so, ‘Let us see another Christmas!’

Scrooge’s former self grew larger at the words, and the room became a little darker and more dirty. The panels shrunk, the windows cracked; fragments of plaster fell out of the ceiling, and the naked laths were shown instead; but how all this was brought about, Scrooge knew no more than you do. He only knew that it was quite correct; that everything had happened so; that there he was, alone again, when all the other boys had gone home for the jolly holidays.

He was not reading now, but walking up and down despairingly. Scrooge looked at the Ghost, and with a mournful shaking of his head, glanced anxiously towards the door.

It opened; and a little girl, much younger than the boy, came darting in, and putting her arms about his neck, and often kissing him, addressed him as her ‘Dear, dear brother.’

‘I have come to bring you home, dear brother!’ said the child, clapping her tiny hands, and bending down to laugh. ‘To bring you home, home, home!’

‘Home, little Fan?’ returned the boy.

‘Yes!’ said the child, brimful of glee. ‘Home, for good and all. Home, for ever and ever. Father is so much kinder than he used to be, that home’s like Heaven! He spoke so gently to me one dear night when I was going to bed, that I was not afraid to ask him once more if you might come home; and he said Yes, you should; and sent me in a coach to bring you. And you’re to be a man!’ said the child, opening her eyes, ‘and are never to come back here; but first, we’re to be together all the Christmas long, and have the merriest time in all the world.’

‘You are quite a woman, little Fan!’ exclaimed the boy.

She clapped her hands and laughed, and tried to touch his head; but being too little, laughed again, and stood on tiptoe to embrace him. Then she began to drag him, in her childish eagerness, towards the door; and he, nothing loth to go, accompanied her.

A terrible voice in the hall cried. ‘Bring down Master Scrooge’s box, there!’ and in the hall appeared the schoolmaster himself, who glared on Master Scrooge with a ferocious condescension, and threw him into a dreadful state of mind by shaking hands with him. He then conveyed him and his sister into the veriest old well of a shivering best-parlour that ever was seen, where the maps upon the wall, and the celestial and terrestrial globes in the windows, were waxy with cold. Here he produced a decanter of curiously light wine, and a block of curiously heavy cake, and administered instalments of those dainties to the young people: at the same time, sending out a meagre servant to offer a glass of something to the postboy, who answered that he thanked the gentleman, but if it was the same tap as he had tasted before, he had rather not. Master Scrooge’s trunk being by this time tied on to the top of the chaise, the children bade the schoolmaster good-bye right willingly; and getting into it, drove gaily down the garden-sweep [8] : the quick wheels dashing the hoar-frost and snow from off the dark leaves of the evergreens like spray.

‘Always a delicate creature, whom a breath might have withered,’ said the Ghost. ‘But she had a large heart.’

‘So she had,’ cried Scrooge. ‘You’re right. I will not gainsay it, Spirit. God forbid!’

‘She died a woman,’ said the Ghost, ‘and had, as I think, children.’

‘One child,’ Scrooge returned.

‘True,’ said the Ghost. ‘Your nephew.’

Scrooge seemed uneasy in his mind; and answered briefly, ‘Yes.’

Although they had but that moment left the school behind them, they were now in the busy thoroughfares of a city, where shadowy passengers passed and repassed; where shadowy carts and coaches battle for the way, and all the strife and tumult of a real city were. It was made plain enough, by the dressing of the shops, that here too it was Christmas time again; but it was evening, and the streets were lighted up.

The Ghost stopped at a certain warehouse door, and asked Scrooge if he knew it.

‘Know it!’ said Scrooge. ‘Was I apprenticed here?’

They went in. At sight of an old gentleman in a Welsh wig [9] , sitting behind such a high desk, that if he had been two inches taller he must have knocked his head against the ceiling, Scrooge cried in great excitement:

‘Why, it’s old Fezziwig! Bless his heart; it’s Fezziwig alive again!’

Old Fezziwig laid down his pen, and looked up at the clock, which pointed to the hour of seven. He rubbed his hands; adjusted his capacious waistcoat; laughed all over himself, from his shoes to his organ of benevolence [10] ; and called out in a comfortable, oily, rich, fat, jovial voice:

‘Yo ho, there! Ebenezer! Dick!’

Scrooge’s former self, now grown a young man, came briskly in, accompanied by his fellow-prentice.

‘Dick Wilkins, to be sure.’ said Scrooge to the Ghost. ‘Bless me, yes. There he is. He was very much attached to me, was Dick. Poor Dick. Dear, dear.’

‘Yo ho, my boys!’ said Fezziwig. ‘No more work to-night. Christmas Eve, Dick. Christmas, Ebenezer! Let’s have the shutters up,’ cried old Fezziwig, with a sharp clap of his hands, ‘before a man can say Jack Robinson!’

You wouldn’t believe how those two fellows went at it! They charged into the street with the shutters–one, two, three–had them up in their places-four, five, six–barred them and pinned ’em–seven, eight, nine–and came back before you could have got to twelve, panting like race-horses.

‘Hilli-ho!’ cried old Fezziwig, skipping down from the high desk, with wonderful agility. ‘Clear away, my lads, and let’s have lots of room here! Hilli-ho, Dick! Chirrup, Ebenezer!’

Clear away! There was nothing they wouldn’t have cleared away, or couldn’t have cleared away, with old Fezziwig looking on. It was done in a minute. Every movable was packed off, as if it were dismissed from public life for evermore; the floor was swept and watered, the lamps were trimmed, fuel was heaped upon the fire; and the warehouse was as snug, and warm, and dry, and bright a ball-room, as you would desire to see upon a winter’s night.

In came a fiddler with a music-book, and went up to the lofty desk, and made an orchestra of it, and tuned like fifty stomach-aches. In came Mrs Fezziwig, one vast substantial smile. In came the three Miss Fezziwigs, beaming and lovable. In came the six young followers whose hearts they broke. In came all the young men and women employed in the business. In came the housemaid, with her cousin, the baker. In came the cook, with her brother’s particular friend, the milkman. In came the boy from over the way, who was suspected of not having board enough from his master; trying to hide himself behind the girl from next door but one, who was proved to have had her ears pulled by her mistress. In they all came, one after another; some shyly, some boldly, some gracefully, some awkwardly, some pushing, some pulling; in they all came, anyhow and everyhow. Away they all went, twenty couple at once; hands half round and back again the other way; down the middle and up again; round and round in various stages of affectionate grouping; old top couple always turning up in the wrong place; new top couple starting off again, as soon as they got there; all top couples at last, and not a bottom one to help them. When this result was brought about, old Fezziwig, clapping his hands to stop the dance, cried out, ‘Well done,’ and the fiddler plunged his hot face into a pot of porter, especially provided for that purpose. But scorning rest, upon his reappearance, he instantly began again, though there were no dancers yet, as if the other fiddler had been carried home, exhausted, on a shutter, and he were a bran-new man resolved to beat him out of sight, or perish.

There were more dances, and there were forfeits, and more dances, and there was cake, and there was negus [11] , and there was a great piece of Cold Roast, and there was a great piece of Cold Boiled, and there were mince-pies, and plenty of beer. But the great effect of the evening came after the Roast and Boiled, when the fiddler (an artful dog, mind. The sort of man who knew his business better than you or I could have told it him!) struck up ‘Sir Roger de Coverley. [12] ’ Then old Fezziwig stood out to dance with Mrs Fezziwig. Top couple, too; with a good stiff piece of work cut out for them; three or four and twenty pair of partners; people who were not to be trifled with; people who would dance, and had no notion of walking.

But if they had been twice as many–ah, four times– old Fezziwig would have been a match for them, and so would Mrs Fezziwig. As to her , she was worthy to be his partner in every sense of the term. If that’s not high praise, tell me higher, and I’ll use it. A positive light appeared to issue from Fezziwig’s calves. They shone in every part of the dance like moons. You couldn’t have predicted, at any given time, what would have become of them next. And when old Fezziwig and Mrs Fezziwig had gone all through the dance; advance and retire, both hands to your partner, bow and curtsey, corkscrew, thread-the-needle, and back again to your place; Fezziwig ‘cut’ [13] —cut so deftly, that he appeared to wink with his legs, and came upon his feet again without a stagger.

When the clock struck eleven, this domestic ball broke up. Mr and Mrs Fezziwig took their stations, one on either side of the door, and shaking hands with every person individually as he or she went out, wished him or her a Merry Christmas. When everybody had retired but the two prentices, they did the same to them; and thus the cheerful voices died away, and the lads were left to their beds; which were under a counter in the back-shop.

During the whole of this time, Scrooge had acted like a man out of his wits. His heart and soul were in the scene, and with his former self. He corroborated everything, remembered everything, enjoyed everything, and underwent the strangest agitation. It was not until now, when the bright faces of his former self and Dick were turned from them, that he remembered the Ghost, and became conscious that it was looking full upon him, while the light upon its head burnt very clear.

‘A small matter,’ said the Ghost, ‘to make these silly folks so full of gratitude.’

‘Small!’ echoed Scrooge.

The Spirit signed to him to listen to the two apprentices, who were pouring out their hearts in praise of Fezziwig: and when he had done so, said,

‘Why! Is it not? He has spent but a few pounds of your mortal money: three or four perhaps. Is that so much that he deserves this praise?’

‘It isn’t that,’ said Scrooge, heated by the remark, and speaking unconsciously like his former, not his latter, self. ‘It isn’t that, Spirit. He has the power to render us happy or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome; a pleasure or a toil. Say that his power lies in words and looks; in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to add and count them up: what then? The happiness he gives, is quite as great as if it cost a fortune.’

He felt the Spirit’s glance, and stopped.

‘What is the matter?’ asked the Ghost.

‘Nothing in particular,’ said Scrooge.

‘Something, I think?’ the Ghost insisted.

‘No,’ said Scrooge, ‘No. I should like to be able to say a word or two to my clerk just now. That’s all.’

His former self turned down the lamps as he gave utterance to the wish; and Scrooge and the Ghost again stood side by side in the open air.

‘My time grows short,’ observed the Spirit. ‘Quick!’

This was not addressed to Scrooge, or to any one whom he could see, but it produced an immediate effect. For again Scrooge saw himself. He was older now; a man in the prime of life. His face had not the harsh and rigid lines of later years; but it had begun to wear the signs of care and avarice. There was an eager, greedy, restless motion in the eye, which showed the passion that had taken root, and where the shadow of the growing tree would fall.

He was not alone, but sat by the side of a fair young girl in a mourning-dress: in whose eyes there were tears, which sparkled in the light that shone out of the Ghost of Christmas Past.

‘It matters little,’ she said, softly. ‘To you, very little. Another idol has displaced me; and if it can cheer and comfort you in time to come, as I would have tried to do, I have no just cause to grieve.’

‘What Idol has displaced you?’ he rejoined.

‘A golden one.’

‘This is the even-handed dealing of the world.’ he said. ‘There is nothing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!’

‘You fear the world too much,’ she answered, gently. ‘All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach. I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one by one, until the master-passion, Gain, engrosses you. Have I not?’

‘What then?’ he retorted. ‘Even if I have grown so much wiser, what then? I am not changed towards you.’

She shook her head.

‘Our contract is an old one. It was made when we were both poor and content to be so, until, in good season, we could improve our worldly fortune by our patient industry. You are changed. When it was made, you were another man.’

‘I was a boy,’ he said impatiently.

‘Your own feeling tells you that you were not what you are,’ she returned. ‘I am. That which promised happiness when we were one in heart, is fraught with misery now that we are two. How often and how keenly I have thought of this, I will not say. It is enough that I have thought of it, and can release you.’

‘Have I ever sought release?’

‘In words. No. Never.’

‘In what, then?’

‘In a changed nature; in an altered spirit; in another atmosphere of life; another Hope as its great end. In everything that made my love of any worth or value in your sight. If this had never been between us,’ said the girl, looking mildly, but with steadiness, upon him; ‘tell me, would you seek me out and try to win me now. Ah, no!’

He seemed to yield to the justice of this supposition, in spite of himself. But he said with a struggle, ‘You think not.’

‘I would gladly think otherwise if I could,’ she answered, ‘Heaven knows! When I have learned a Truth like this, I know how strong and irresistible it must be. But if you were free to-day, to-morrow, yesterday, can even I believe that you would choose a dowerless girl–you who, in your very confidence with her, weigh everything by Gain: or, choosing her, if for a moment you were false enough to your one guiding principle to do so, do I not know that your repentance and regret would surely follow? I do; and I release you. With a full heart, for the love of him you once were.’

He was about to speak; but with her head turned from him, she resumed.

‘You may–the memory of what is past half makes me hope you will–have pain in this. A very, very brief time, and you will dismiss the recollection of it, gladly, as an unprofitable dream, from which it happened well that you awoke. May you be happy in the life you have chosen!’

She left him, and they parted.

‘Spirit!’ said Scrooge, ‘show me no more! Conduct me home. Why do you delight to torture me?’

‘One shadow more!’ exclaimed the Ghost.

‘No more!’ cried Scrooge. ‘No more, I don’t wish to see it. Show me no more!’

But the relentless Ghost pinioned him in both his arms, and forced him to observe what happened next.

They were in another scene and place; a room, not very large or handsome, but full of comfort. Near to the winter fire sat a beautiful young girl, so like that last that Scrooge believed it was the same, until he saw her , now a comely matron, sitting opposite her daughter. The noise in this room was perfectly tumultuous, for there were more children there, than Scrooge in his agitated state of mind could count; and, unlike the celebrated herd in the poem [14] , they were not forty children conducting themselves like one, but every child was conducting itself like forty. The consequences were uproarious beyond belief; but no one seemed to care; on the contrary, the mother and daughter laughed heartily, and enjoyed it very much; and the latter, soon beginning to mingle in the sports, got pillaged by the young brigands most ruthlessly. What would I not have given to one of them! Though I never could have been so rude, no, no! I wouldn’t for the wealth of all the world have crushed that braided hair, and torn it down; and for the precious little shoe, I wouldn’t have plucked it off, God bless my soul. to save my life. As to measuring her waist in sport, as they did, bold young brood, I couldn’t have done it; I should have expected my arm to have grown round it for a punishment, and never come straight again. And yet I should have dearly liked, I own, to have touched her lips; to have questioned her, that she might have opened them; to have looked upon the lashes of her downcast eyes, and never raised a blush; to have let loose waves of hair, an inch of which would be a keepsake beyond price: in short, I should have liked, I do confess, to have had the lightest licence of a child, and yet to have been man enough to know its value.

But now a knocking at the door was heard, and such a rush immediately ensued that she with laughing face and plundered dress was borne towards it the centre of a flushed and boisterous group, just in time to greet the father, who came home attended by a man laden with Christmas toys and presents. Then the shouting and the struggling, and the onslaught that was made on the defenceless porter! The scaling him with chairs for ladders to dive into his pockets, despoil him of brown-paper parcels, hold on tight by his cravat, hug him round his neck, pommel his back, and kick his legs in irrepressible affection! The shouts of wonder and delight with which the development of every package was received! The terrible announcement that the baby had been taken in the act of putting a doll’s frying-pan into his mouth, and was more than suspected of having swallowed a fictitious turkey, glued on a wooden platter! The immense relief of finding this a false alarm! The joy, and gratitude, and ecstasy! They are all indescribable alike. It is enough that by degrees the children and their emotions got out of the parlour, and by one stair at a time, up to the top of the house; where they went to bed, and so subsided.

And now Scrooge looked on more attentively than ever, when the master of the house, having his daughter leaning fondly on him, sat down with her and her mother at his own fireside; and when he thought that such another creature, quite as graceful and as full of promise, might have called him father, and been a spring-time in the haggard winter of his life, his sight grew very dim indeed.

‘Belle,’ said the husband, turning to his wife with a smile, ‘I saw an old friend of yours this afternoon.’

‘Who was it?’

‘How can I? Tut, don’t I know?’ she added in the same breath, laughing as he he laughed. ‘Mr Scrooge.’

‘Mr Scrooge it was. I passed his office window; and as it was not shut up, and he had a candle inside, I could scarcely help seeing him. His partner lies upon the point of death, I hear; and there he sat alone. Quite alone in the world, I do believe.’

‘Spirit!’ said Scrooge in a broken voice, ‘remove me from this place.’

‘I told you these were shadows of the things that have been,’ said the Ghost. ‘That they are what they are, do not blame me!’

‘Remove me!’ Scrooge exclaimed, ‘I cannot bear it!’

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, wrestled with it.

‘Leave me! Take me back! Haunt me no longer!’

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.

The Spirit dropped beneath it, so that the extinguisher covered its whole form; but though Scrooge pressed it down with all his force, he could not hide the light, which streamed from under it, in an unbroken flood upon the ground.

He was conscious of being exhausted, and overcome by an irresistible drowsiness; and, further, of being in his own bedroom. He gave the cap a parting squeeze, in which his hand relaxed; and had barely time to reel to bed, before he sank into a heavy sleep.

Watch. ↵
In 1837, many individual states had to default on loans from English lenders. ↵
Candle snuffer. ↵
To crush down a person’s hat over his or her eyes. ↵
Hero of a story in the Arabian Nights . ↵
Valentine and Orson were the main characters in an old French romance. ↵
Further characters from Arabian Nights (“Noureddin Ali of Cairo and His Son Bedreddin Hassan”). ↵
A carriage driveway through a garden. ↵
A close-fitting woollen cap. ↵
Top of the head, according to phrenology, a pseudo-science that purported to be able to determine one’s character based on the shape of the skull. ↵
A punch made of sweetened wine, hot water, spices, and lemon. ↵
The name of an English country dance. ↵
A leap in the air while wiggling the legs back and forth before descending. ↵
An allusion to the first stanza of Wordsworth’s poem “Written in March”: “The cattle are grazing,/Their heads never raising;/There are forty feeding like one!” ↵

This work ( A Christmas Carol: Stave 2 by Charles Dickens) is free of known copyright restrictions.

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A Christmas Carol

By charles dickens.

Year Published: 1843
Language: English
Country of Origin: England
Source: Dickens, C. (1843). A Christmas Carol . London, England: Chapman and Hall.
Flesch–Kincaid Level: 6.7
Word Count: 6,564
Genre: Fantasy
Keywords: forgiveness, ghost story, greed, morality, redemption, victorian
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Dickens, C. (1843). “Stave II”. A Christmas Carol (Lit2Go Edition). Retrieved March 31, 2024, from https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/160/a-christmas-carol/2825/stave-ii/

Dickens, Charles. "“Stave II”." A Christmas Carol . Lit2Go Edition. 1843. Web. https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/160/a-christmas-carol/2825/stave-ii/ >. March 31, 2024.

Charles Dickens, "“Stave II”," A Christmas Carol , Lit2Go Edition, (1843), accessed March 31, 2024, https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/160/a-christmas-carol/2825/stave-ii/ .

The First of the Three Spirits

When Scrooge awoke, it was so dark, that looking out of bed, he could scarcely distinguish the transparent window from the opaque walls of his chamber. He was endeavouring to pierce the darkness with his ferret eyes, when the chimes of a neighbouring church struck the four quarters. So he listened for the hour. To his great astonishment the heavy bell went on from six to seven, and from seven to eight, and regularly up to twelve; then stopped. Twelve. It was past two when he went to bed. The clock was wrong. An icicle must have got into the works. Twelve.

He touched the spring of his repeater, to correct this most preposterous clock. Its rapid little pulse beat twelve: and stopped.

“Why, it isn’t possible,” said Scrooge, “that I can have slept through a whole day and far into another night. It isn’t possible that anything has happened to the sun, and this is twelve at noon.”

The idea being an alarming one, he scrambled out of bed, and groped his way to the window. He was obliged to rub the frost off with the sleeve of his dressing-gown before he could see anything; and could see very little then. All he could make out was, that it was still very foggy and extremely cold, and that there was no noise of people running to and fro, and making a great stir, as there unquestionably would have been if night had beaten off bright day, and taken possession of the world. This was a great relief, because “three days after sight of this First of Exchange pay to Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge or his order,” and so forth, would have become a mere United States’ security if there were no days to count by.

Scrooge went to bed again, and thought, and thought, and thought it over and over and over, and could make nothing of it. The more he thought, the more perplexed he was; and the more he endeavored not to think, the more he thought. Marley’s Ghost bothered him exceedingly. Every time he resolved within himself, after mature inquiry, that it was all a dream, his mind flew back again, like a strong spring released, to its first position, and presented the same problem to be worked all through, “Was it a dream or not?”

Scrooge lay in this state until the chimes had gone three quarters more, when he remembered, on a sudden, that the Ghost had warned him of a visitation when the bell tolled one. He resolved to lie awake until the hour was past; and, considering that he could no more go to sleep than go to Heaven, this was perhaps the wisest resolution in his power.

The quarter was so long, that he was more than once convinced he must have sunk into a doze unconsciously, and missed the clock. At length it broke upon his listening ear.

“Ding, dong!”

“A quarter past,” said Scrooge, counting.

“Ding dong!”

“Half past!” said Scrooge.

“A quarter to it,” said Scrooge.

“The hour itself,” said Scrooge, triumphantly,

“and nothing else!”

He spoke before the hour bell sounded, which it now did with a deep, dull, hollow, melancholy One. Light flashed up in the room upon the instant, and the curtains of his bed were drawn.

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. It wore a tunic of the purest white, and round its waist was bound a lustrous belt, the sheen of which was beautiful. It held a branch of fresh green holly in its hand; and, in singular contradiction of that wintry emblem, had its dress trimmed with summer flowers. 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.

“Are you the Spirit, sir, whose coming was foretold to me?” asked Scrooge.

“I am.”

The voice was soft and gentle. Singularly low, as if instead of being so close beside him, it were at a distance.

“Who, and what are you?” Scrooge demanded.

“I am the Ghost of Christmas Past.”

“Long Past?” inquired Scrooge: observant of its dwarfish stature.

“No. Your past.”

Perhaps, Scrooge could not have told anybody why, if anybody could have asked him; but he had a special desire to see the Spirit in his cap; and begged him to be covered.

“What!” exclaimed the Ghost, “Would you so soon put out, with worldly hands, the light I give? Is it not enough that you are one of those whose passions made this cap, and force me through whole trains of years to wear it low upon my brow!”

Scrooge reverently disclaimed all intention to offend or any knowledge of having willfully bonneted the Spirit at any period of his life. He then made bold to inquire what business brought him there.

“Your welfare,” said the Ghost.

“Your reclamation, then. Take heed.”

It put out its strong hand as it spoke, and clasped him gently by the arm.

“Rise. And walk with me.”

“I am mortal,” Scrooge remonstrated, “and liable to fall.”

“Bear but a touch of my hand there,” said the Spirit, laying it upon his heart, “and you shall be upheld in more than this.”

“Good Heaven!” said Scrooge, clasping his hands together, as he looked about him. “I was bred in this place. I was a boy here.”

“Your lip is trembling,” said the Ghost. “And what is that upon your cheek?”

Scrooge muttered, with an unusual catching in his voice, that it was a pimple; and begged the Ghost to lead him where he would.

“You recollect the way?” inquired the Spirit.

“Remember it!” cried Scrooge with fervour – “I could walk it blindfold.”

“Strange to have forgotten it for so many years,” observed the Ghost. “Let us go on.”

“These are but shadows of the things that have been,” said the Ghost. “They have no consciousness of us.”

The jocund travellers came on; and as they came, Scrooge knew and named them every one. Why was he rejoiced beyond all bounds to see them. Why did his cold eye glisten, and his heart leap up as they went past? Why was he filled with gladness when he heard them give each other Merry Christmas, as they parted at cross-roads and-bye ways, for their several homes? What was merry Christmas to Scrooge? Out upon merry Christmas! What good had it ever done to him?

“The school is not quite deserted,” said the Ghost. “A solitary child, neglected by his friends, is left there still.”

Scrooge said he knew it. And he sobbed.

Not a latent echo in the house, not a squeak and scuffle from the mice behind the paneling, not a drip from the half-thawed water-spout in the dull yard behind, not a sigh among the leafless boughs of one despondent poplar, not the idle swinging of an empty store-house door, no, not a clicking in the fire, but fell upon the heart of Scrooge with a softening influence, and gave a freer passage to his tears.

The Spirit touched him on the arm, and pointed to his younger self, intent upon his reading. Suddenly a man, in foreign garments: wonderfully real and distinct to look at: stood outside the window, with an ax stuck in his belt, and leading by the bridle an ass laden with wood.

“Why, it’s Ali Baba!” Scrooge exclaimed in ecstasy. “It’s dear old honest Ali Baba. Yes, yes, I know. One Christmas time, when yonder solitary child was left here all alone, he did come, for the first time, just like that. Poor boy. And Valentine,” said Scrooge, “and his wild brother, Orson; there they go. And what’s his name, who was put down in his drawers, asleep, at the Gate of Damascus; don’t you see him? And the Sultan’s Groom turned upside down by the Genii; there he is upon his head. Serve him right. I’m glad of it. What business had he to be married to the Princess.”

“There’s the Parrot.” cried Scrooge. “Green body and yellow tail, with a thing like a lettuce growing out of the top of his head; there he is! Poor Robin Crusoe, he called him, when he came home again after sailing round the island. “Poor Robin Crusoe, where have you been, Robin Crusoe?” The man thought he was dreaming, but he wasn’t. It was the Parrot, you know. There goes Friday, running for his life to the little creek! Halloa! Hoop! Hallo!”

Then, with a rapidity of transition very foreign to his usual character, he said, in pity for his former self, “Poor boy!” and cried again.

“I wish,” Scrooge muttered, putting his hand in his pocket, and looking about him, after drying his eyes with his cuff: “but it’s too late now.”

“What is the matter?” asked the Spirit.

“Nothing,” said Scrooge. “Nothing. There was a boy singing a Christmas Carol at my door last night. I should like to have given him something: that’s all.”

The Ghost smiled thoughtfully, and waved its hand: saying as it did so, “Let us see another Christmas!”

He was not reading now, but walking up and down despairingly. Scrooge looked at the Ghost, and with a mournful shaking of his head, glanced anxiously towards the door.

It opened; and a little girl, much younger than the boy, came darting in, and putting her arms about his neck, and often kissing him, addressed him as her “Dear, dear brother.”

“I have come to bring you home, dear brother!” said the child, clapping her tiny hands, and bending down to laugh. “To bring you home, home, home!”

“Home, little Fan?” returned the boy.

“Yes!” said the child, brimful of glee. “Home, for good and all. Home, for ever and ever. Father is so much kinder than he used to be, that home’s like Heaven! He spoke so gently to me one dear night when I was going to bed, that I was not afraid to ask him once more if you might come home; and he said Yes, you should; and sent me in a coach to bring you. And you’re to be a man!” said the child, opening her eyes, “and are never to come back here; but first, we’re to be together all the Christmas long, and have the merriest time in all the world.”

“You are quite a woman, little Fan!”exclaimed the boy.

A terrible voice in the hall cried. “Bring down Master Scrooge’s box, there!” And in the hall appeared the schoolmaster himself, who glared on Master Scrooge with a ferocious condescension, and threw him into a dreadful state of mind by shaking hands with him. He then conveyed him and his sister into the veriest old well of a shivering best-parlour that ever was seen, where the maps upon the wall, and the celestial and terrestrial globes in the windows, were waxy with cold. Here he produced a decanter of curiously light wine, and a block of curiously heavy cake, and administered installments of those dainties to the young people: at the same time, sending out a meagre servant to offer a glass of “something” to the postboy, who answered that he thanked the gentleman, but if it was the same tap as he had tasted before, he had rather not. Master Scrooge’s trunk being by this time tied on to the top of the chaise, the children bade the schoolmaster good-bye right willingly; and getting into it, drove gaily down the garden-sweep: the quick wheels dashing the hoar-frost and snow from off the dark leaves of the evergreens like spray.

“Always a delicate creature, whom a breath might have withered,” said the Ghost. “But she had a large heart!”

“So she had,” cried Scrooge. “You’re right. I’ll not gainsay it, Spirit. God forbid!”

“She died a woman,” said the Ghost, “and had, as I think, children.”

“One child,” Scrooge returned.

“True,” said the Ghost. “Your nephew!”

Scrooge seemed uneasy in his mind; and answered briefly, “Yes.”

The Ghost stopped at a certain warehouse door, and asked Scrooge if he knew it.

“Know it!” said Scrooge. “Was I apprenticed here?”

They went in. At sight of an old gentleman in a Welsh wig, sitting behind such a high desk, that if he had been two inches taller he must have knocked his head against the ceiling, Scrooge cried in great excitement:

“Why, it’s old Fezziwig! Bless his heart; it’s Fezziwig alive again!”

Old Fezziwig laid down his pen, and looked up at the clock, which pointed to the hour of seven. He rubbed his hands; adjusted his capacious waistcoat; laughed all over himself, from his shows to his organ of benevolence; and called out in a comfortable, oily, rich, fat, jovial voice:

“Yo ho, there! Ebenezer! Dick!”

Scrooge’s former self, now grown a young man, came briskly in, accompanied by his fellow-prentice.

“Dick Wilkins, to be sure,” said Scrooge to the Ghost. “Bless me, yes. There he is. He was very much attached to me, was Dick. Poor Dick. Dear, dear.”

“Yo ho, my boys!” said Fezziwig. “No more work to-night. Christmas Eve, Dick. Christmas, Ebenezer. Let’s have the shutters up,” cried old Fezziwig, with a sharp clap of his hands, “before a man can say Jack Robinson.”

You wouldn’t believe how those two fellows went at it. They charged into the street with the shutters – one, two, three – had them up in their places – four, five, six – barred them and pinned then – seven, eight, nine – and came back before you could have got to twelve, panting like race-horses.

“Hilli-ho!” cried old Fezziwig, skipping down from the high desk, with wonderful agility. “Clear away, my lads, and let’s have lots of room here. Hilli-ho, Dick! Chirrup, Ebenezer.”

In came a fiddler with a music-book, and went up to the lofty desk, and made an orchestra of it, and tuned like fifty stomach-aches. In came Mrs Fezziwig, one vast substantial smile. In came the three Miss Fezziwigs, beaming and lovable. In came the six young followers whose hearts they broke. In came all the young men and women employed in the business. In came the housemaid, with her cousin, the baker. In came the cook, with her brother’s particular friend, the milkman. In came the boy from over the way, who was suspected of not having board enough from his master; trying to hide himself behind the girl from next door but one, who was proved to have had her ears pulled by her mistress. In they all came, one after another; some shyly, some boldly, some gracefully, some awkwardly, some pushing, some pulling; in they all came, anyhow and everyhow. Away they all went, twenty couple at once; hands half round and back again the other way; down the middle and up again; round and round in various stages of affectionate grouping; old top couple always turning up in the wrong place; new top couple starting off again, as soon as they got there; all top couples at last, and not a bottom one to help them. When this result was brought about, old Fezziwig, clapping his hands to stop the dance, cried out, “Well done!” and the fiddler plunged his hot face into a pot of porter, especially provided for that purpose. But scorning rest, upon his reappearance, he instantly began again, though there were no dancers yet, as if the other fiddler had been carried home, exhausted, on a shutter, and he were a bran-new man resolved to beat him out of sight, or perish.

There were more dances, and there were forfeits, and more dances, and there was cake, and there was negus, and there was a great piece of Cold Roast, and there was a great piece of Cold Boiled, and there were mince-pies, and plenty of beer. But the great effect of the evening came after the Roast and Boiled, when the fiddler (an artful dog, mind! The sort of man who knew his business better than you or I could have told it him!) struck up “Sir Roger de Coverley.” Then old Fezziwig stood out to dance with Mrs Fezziwig. Top couple too; with a good stiff piece of work cut out for them; three or four and twenty pair of partners; people who were not to be trifled with; people who would dance, and had no notion of walking.

But if they had been twice as many – ah, four times – old Fezziwig would have been a match for them, and so would Mrs Fezziwig. As to her, she was worthy to be his partner in every sense of the term. If that’s not high praise, tell me higher, and I’ll use it. A positive light appeared to issue from Fezziwig’s calves. They shone in every part of the dance like moons. You couldn’t have predicted, at any given time, what would have become of them next. And when old Fezziwig and Mrs Fezziwig had gone all through the dance; advance and retire, both hands to your partner, bow and curtsey, corkscrew, thread-the-needle, and back again to your place; Fezziwig cut – cut so deftly, that he appeared to wink with his legs, and came upon his feet again without a stagger.

“A small matter,” said the Ghost, “to make these silly folks so full of gratitude.”

“Small!” echoed Scrooge.

The Spirit signed to him to listen to the two apprentices, who were pouring out their hearts in praise of Fezziwig: and when he had done so, said,

“Why! Is it not! He has spent but a few pounds of your mortal money: three or four perhaps. Is that so much that he deserves this praise?”

“It isn’t that,” said Scrooge, heated by the remark, and speaking unconsciously like his former, not his latter, self. “It isn’t that, Spirit. He has the power to render us happy or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome; a pleasure or a toil. Say that his power lies in words and looks; in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to add and count them up: what then? The happiness he gives, is quite as great as if it cost a fortune.”

He felt the Spirit’s glance, and stopped.

“What is the matter?” asked the Ghost.

“Nothing in particular,” said Scrooge.

“Something, I think?” the Ghost insisted.

“No,” said Scrooge, “No. I should like to be able to say a word or two to my clerk just now! That’s all.”

His former self turned down the lamps as he gave utterance to the wish; and Scrooge and the Ghost again stood side by side in the open air.

“My time grows short,” observed the Spirit. “Quick!”

He was not alone, but sat by the side of a fair young girl in a mourning-dress: in whose eyes there were tears, which sparkled in the light that shone out of the Ghost of Christmas Past.

“It matters little,” she said, softly. “To you, very little. Another idol has displaced me; and if it can cheer and comfort you in time to come, as I would have tried to do, I have no just cause to grieve.”

“What Idol has displaced you?” he rejoined.

“A golden one.”

“This is the even-handed dealing of the world!” he said. “There is nothing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!”

“You fear the world too much,” she answered, gently. “All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach. I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one by one, until the master-passion, Gain, engrosses you. Have I not?”

“What then?” he retorted. “Even if I have grown so much wiser, what then? I am not changed towards you.”

She shook her head.

“Am I?”

“Our contract is an old one. It was made when we were both poor and content to be so, until, in good season, we could improve our worldly fortune by our patient industry. You are changed. When it was made, you were another man.”

“I was a boy,” he said impatiently.

“Your own feeling tells you that you were not what you are,” she returned. “I am. That which promised happiness when we were one in heart, is fraught with misery now that we are two. How often and how keenly I have thought of this, I will not say. It is enough that I have thought of it, and can release you.”

“Have I ever sought release?”

“In words? No. Never.”

“In what, then?”

“In a changed nature; in an altered spirit; in another atmosphere of life; another Hope as its great end. In everything that made my love of any worth or value in your sight. If this had never been between us,” said the girl, looking mildly, but with steadiness, upon him; “tell me, would you seek me out and try to win me now? Ah, no!”

He seemed to yield to the justice of this supposition, in spite of himself. But he said with a struggle,” You think not?”

“I would gladly think otherwise if I could,” she answered, “Heaven knows. When I have learned a Truth like this, I know how strong and irresistible it must be. But if you were free to-day, to-morrow, yesterday, can even I believe that you would choose a dowerless girl – you who, in your very confidence with her, weigh everything by Gain: or, choosing her, if for a moment you were false enough to your one guiding principle to do so, do I not know that your repentance and regret would surely follow? I do; and I release you. With a full heart, for the love of him you once were.”

He was about to speak; but with her head turned from him, she resumed.

“You may – the memory of what is past half makes me hope you will – have pain in this. A very, very brief time, and you will dismiss the recollection of it, gladly, as an unprofitable dream, from which it happened well that you awoke. May you be happy in the life you have chosen.”

She left him, and they parted.

“Spirit!” said Scrooge, “show me no more! Conduct me home. Why do you delight to torture me?”

“One shadow more!” exclaimed the Ghost.

“No more!” cried Scrooge! “No more, I don’t wish to see it! Show me no more!”

But the relentless Ghost pinioned him in both his arms, and forced him to observe what happened next.

They were in another scene and place; a room, not very large or handsome, but full of comfort. Near to the winter fire sat a beautiful young girl, so like that last that Scrooge believed it was the same, until he saw her, now a comely matron, sitting opposite her daughter. The noise in this room was perfectly tumultuous, for there were more children there, than Scrooge in his agitated state of mind could count; and, unlike the celebrated herd in the poem, they were not forty children conducting themselves like one, but every child was conducting itself like forty. The consequences were uproarious beyond belief; but no one seemed to care; on the contrary, the mother and daughter laughed heartily, and enjoyed it very much; and the latter, soon beginning to mingle in the sports, got pillaged by the young brigands most ruthlessly. What would I not have given to one of them. Though I never could have been so rude, no, no! I wouldn’t for the wealth of all the world have crushed that braided hair, and torn it down; and for the precious little shoe, I wouldn’t have plucked it off, God bless my soul! to save my life. As to measuring her waist in sport, as they did, bold young brood, I couldn’t have done it; I should have expected my arm to have grown round it for a punishment, and never come straight again. And yet I should have dearly liked, I own, to have touched her lips; to have questioned her, that she might have opened them; to have looked upon the lashes of her downcast eyes, and never raised a blush; to have let loose waves of hair, an inch of which would be a keepsake beyond price: in short, I should have liked, I do confess, to have had the lightest licence of a child, and yet to have been man enough to know its value.

But now a knocking at the door was heard, and such a rush immediately ensued that she with laughing face and plundered dress was borne towards it the centre of a flushed and boisterous group, just in time to greet the father, who came home attended by a man laden with Christmas toys and presents. Then the shouting and the struggling, and the onslaught that was made on the defenceless porter. The scaling him with chairs for ladders to dive into his pockets, despoil him of brown-paper parcels, hold on tight by his cravat, hug him round his neck, pommel his back, and kick his legs in irrepressible affection. The shouts of wonder and delight with which the development of every package was received. The terrible announcement that the baby had been taken in the act of putting a doll’s frying-pan into his mouth, and was more than suspected of having swallowed a fictitious turkey, glued on a wooden platter. The immense relief of finding this a false alarm. The joy, and gratitude, and ecstasy. They are all indescribable alike. It is enough that by degrees the children and their emotions got out of the parlour, and by one stair at a time, up to the top of the house; where they went to bed, and so subsided.

“Belle,” said the husband, turning to his wife with a smile, “I saw an old friend of yours this afternoon.”

“Who was it?”

“Guess!”

“How can I? Tut, don’t I know,” she added in the same breath, laughing as he laughed. “Mr. Scrooge.”

“Mr. Scrooge it was. I passed his office window; and as it was not shut up, and he had a candle inside, I could scarcely help seeing him. His partner lies upon the point of death, I hear; and there he sat alone. Quite alone in the world, I do believe.”

“Spirit!” said Scrooge in a broken voice, “remove me from this place.”

“I told you these were shadows of the things that have been,” said the Ghost. “That they are what they are, do not blame me!”

“Remove me!” Scrooge exclaimed, “I cannot bear it!”

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, wrestled with it.

“Leave me! Take me back. Haunt me no longer!”

Summary (A Christmas Carol)

Below is a summary of a Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.

The novella opens on Christmas Eve in London, seven years after the death of Ebenezer Scrooge’s business partner Jacob Marley. Scrooge is a lonely, aging old miser. He hates Christmas and as such refuses a dinner invitation from his nephew Fred (the son of his dead sister Fan). Scrooge turns away two men who are collecting money for the local poor. He only grudgingly give’s his underpaid clerk Bob Cratchit Christmas Day off with pay as this is the custom.

That evening Scrooge is visited at home by the ghost of his dead business partner Jacob Marley. Marley was like Scrooge a miserly person, has been condemned to wander the earth entwined by heavy chains and money boxes forged during his lifetime of greed. Marley warns Scrooge that he has one chance to avoid the same fate and tells him that he will be visited by three spirits and must listen to them.

The first spirit arrives, The Ghost of Christmas Past, the spirit takes Scrooge to Christmas scenes from his own childhood and adolescence. The scenes reveal Scrooge’s lonely and miserable childhood at boarding school and his relationship with his beloved sister Fan. They also show the Christmas party hosted by Mr Fezziwig, with whom Scrooge did his apprenticeship. Mr Fezziwig treated Scrooge like his own son. Scrooge also sees his former neglected Fiancé Belle, she is shown breaking off their engagement as she knows Scrooge will never love her as much as he loves money. The ghost then takes Scrooge to see Belle and her happy large family on the Christmas Eve that Marley died. Scrooge is upset when he hears her description of him and demands the spirit removes him from the house.

Stave three

Stave three begins with the arrival of the second spirit, The Ghost of Christmas Present. Firstly the spirit takes scrooge to a couple of happy Christmas scenes, including a market with people buying ingredients for their Christmas Dinners and celebrations in a miner’s cottage and in a lighthouse.

The ghost then takes Scrooge to see people he knows. Firstly his nephew Fred’s Christmas party then to see the Cratchit family. Here Scrooge sees Bob’ youngest son Tiny Tim, Tiny Tim Is a crippled boy who is seriously ill. The spirit warns Scrooge that Tiny Tim will die soon unless the course of events changes.

Before the ghost departs, it shows Scrooge two hideous children named Ignorance and Want. The spirit tells Scrooge to beware of the former above all.

The third spirit The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come arrives, the ghost shows Scrooge Christmas Day in the future. The ghost remains silent and shows Scrooge scenes involving the death of a hated man, whose funeral is only attended by local businessmen as they will be given a free lunch. His charwomen, laundress and the undertaker steal his possessions to sell to a pawnbroker. Scrooge asks the spirit to show him a single person who feels any emotion over his death, he is only shown one poor couple who rejoice at his death as it gives them time to repay their debts.

When asked to see tenderness connected to any death, he is shown the Cratchit family mourning the death of Tiny Tim. The ghost then shows Scrooge his neglected grave. Sobbing Scrooge pledges to change his ways.

Scrooge awakens on Christmas morning a genuinely changed man. He starts by making a large donation to the charity he rejected the day before. He anonymously sends a large turkey to the Cratchit family and spends the afternoon with Fred’s family. The following day he gives Bob Cratchit a substantial pay rise and becomes a father figure to Tiny Tim. From then on Scrooge treats everyone with compassion, generosity and kindness.

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A Christmas Carol Stave 2 Summary & Analysis
Analysis. Scrooge awakes and finds his room as dark as when he fell asleep at two o'clock. He listens for the church bell but when it comes, it strikes twelve. He must have slept through a whole day and half a night. He doesn't believe it, but when he goes to the window, the street is deserted and dark as nighttime.
A Christmas Carol Stave Two: The First of the Three Spirits Summary
A summary of Stave Two: The First of the Three Spirits in Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. Learn exactly what happened in this chapter, scene, or section of A Christmas Carol and what it means. Perfect for acing essays, tests, and quizzes, as well as for writing lesson plans.
A Christmas Carol
To Scrooge's amazement, they find themselves on a country road rather than in London. Scrooge realizes they are near the school he attended as a young boy. He sees some boys, his old school-fellows, leaving the school for the holidays, and he tries to talk to them. They cannot see or hear him.
Plot summary Stave Two: The first of the three spirits A Christmas
Stave Two: The first of the three spirits. The Ghost of Christmas Past shows Scrooge his unhappy childhood. They visit the house of Scrooge's first employer, Fezziwig, who is holding a Christmas party. Scrooge notices how much happiness can be obtained from very little money. Scrooge sees himself as a young man with Belle, the woman he was ...
A Christmas Carol Stave Two Summary and Analysis
A Christmas Carol Summary and Analysis of Stave Two. Scrooge wakes up, and the bell of a neighborhood church rings from six until twelve, then stops. He wonders if he slept through the day and into another night. He looks out the window to an empty scene. He worries over Marley's ghost and wonders if it was a dream.
A Christmas Carol
A Christmas Carol Stave 2 Summary. This summary of Stave 2 in A Christmas Carol will be broken into sections to show the major events Scrooge witnesses and how they affect him. As the Stave begins ...
A Christmas Carol Stave 2 Summary
Stave 2 Summary. Last Updated September 5, 2023. When Ebenezer Scrooge awakens in the dark room, the clock strikes midnight. He frets over Marley's apparition and warnings and cannot stop his ...
A Christmas Carol Stave 2 Summary
Summary. Ebenezer Scrooge wakes in the middle of the night. The clock strikes midnight, which confuses and disorients him, because he remembers falling asleep at 2 o'clock. He cannot figure out whether he slept through an entire day or it's noon and a terrible plague has stolen the sun. He lies in bed for the next hour, contemplating whether ...
A Christmas Carol Stave 2 Summary
Also, it's the first nice Christmas scene we've gotten so far—the point being that just for a few bucks, Mr. and Mrs. Fezziwig make a whole bunch of neighborhood apprentice kids happy for a few hours and are then remembered with affection forever.
A Christmas Carol Stave 2
Find out what happens in our Stave 2 summary for A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. This free study guide is stuffed with the juicy details and important facts you need to know. The store will not work correctly in the case when cookies are disabled. ... Stave 2. The First of the Three Spirits.
A Christmas Carol Stave 2 Summary
A Christmas Carol Stave 2 Summary. Scrooge awoke to find that even though he had gone to bed after two o'clock in the morning, it was somehow twelve. It seemed as though no time had passed, but in fact time had somehow gone in reverse. He realized the first apparition was scheduled to appear at one, so he sat up anxiously waiting for the bell ...
A Christmas Carol: Novel Summary: Stave 2
Stave Two: "The First of the Three Spirits" Scrooge awakens in the night and at first thinks he has slept either through an entire day: nearby church bells are striking twelve, and Scrooge had gone to bed after two in the morning. Confused, Scrooge reflects on his meeting with Marley's Ghost. He cannot decide whether the experience was real. As if to test his earlier hypothesis that the entire ...
Charles Dickens
A Christmas Carol (Part 2) Lyrics. Stave 2: The First of the Three Spirits. When Scrooge awoke, it was so dark, that looking out of bed, he could scarcely distinguish the transparent window from ...
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens: Summary Stave 2
Summary Stave 2. Scrooge's clock quickly goes through the hours. He ponders whether Marley's ghost had been real. When the bell tolls one, lights appear in his room and his bed curtains are pulled aside by another's hand. The spirit acknowledges it is the one Marley had spoken of, here for Scrooge's salvation.
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Summarize videos instantly with our Course Assistant plugin, and enjoy AI-generated quizzes: https://bit.ly/ch-ai-asst Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol ex...
A Christmas Carol Summary
A Christmas Carol Summary. A Christmas Carol is a novella about Ebenezer Scrooge, ... In Stave 2 of A Christmas Carol, how is the Ghost of Christmas Past dressed and what does it symbolize?
A Christmas Carol: Full Book Summary
A Christmas Carol Full Book Summary. A mean-spirited, miserly old man named Ebenezer Scrooge sits in his counting-house on a frigid Christmas Eve. His clerk, Bob Cratchit, shivers in the anteroom because Scrooge refuses to spend money on heating coals for a fire. Scrooge's nephew, Fred, pays his uncle a visit and invites him to his annual ...
A Christmas Carol Full Text
Stave Two. The First of the Three Spirits. W HEN SCROOGE AWOKE, it was so dark, that looking out of bed, he could scarcely distinguish the transparent window from the opaque walls of his chamber. He was endeavouring to pierce the darkness with his ferret eyes, when the chimes of a neighbouring church struck the four quarters.
A Christmas Carol: Stave Two Summary
Welcome to the second video in my "'A Christmas Carol' GCSE English Literature Revision" series! In this video, I summarise the novella's second stave (chapt...
A Christmas Carol: Stave 2
24 A Christmas Carol: Stave 2 Charles Dickens. The First of the Three Spirits. When Scrooge awoke, it was so dark, that looking out of bed, he could scarcely distinguish the transparent window from the opaque walls of his chamber. He was endeavouring to pierce the darkness with his ferret eyes, when the chimes of a neighbouring church struck ...
A Christmas Carol Stave One: Marley's Ghost Summary & Analysis
A summary of Stave One: Marley's Ghost in Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. Learn exactly what happened in this chapter, scene, or section of A Christmas Carol and what it means. Perfect for acing essays, tests, and quizzes, as well as for writing lesson plans.
"Stave II"
The First of the Three Spirits. When Scrooge awoke, it was so dark, that looking out of bed, he could scarcely distinguish the transparent window from the opaque walls of his chamber. He was endeavouring to pierce the darkness with his ferret eyes, when the chimes of a neighbouring church struck the four quarters.
Summary (A Christmas Carol)
Below is a summary of a Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. Stave one. The novella opens on Christmas Eve in London, seven years after the death of Ebenezer Scrooge's business partner Jacob Marley. Scrooge is a lonely, aging old miser. He hates Christmas and as such refuses a dinner invitation from his nephew Fred (the son of his dead sister ...