Study Guide

Charles Dickens’
A Christmas Carol
Lecture 3
Christmas Past:
“His Poor Forgotten Self”

Suggested Readings

● A Christmas Carol, “Stave Two: The First of the Three Spirits”

Outline

0:00-9:17 — The Ghost of Christmas Past

● Scrooge awakes in the dark and is confused because the bell in the clock tower strikes twelve, but he
had gone to bed after two in the morning. Scrooge is no longer in control of time.
● Scrooge lies awake for an hour trying to determine if Marley’s visit had been a dream or reality. As the
clock strikes one, a hand draws back Scrooge’s bed curtains and reveals the Ghost of Christmas Past.
o The Ghost of Christmas Past constantly shifts appearance as Scrooge looks at it.
o When Scrooge asks what it is and why it has come, the ghost responds that it is the ghost
of Scrooge’s past and that it has come to work Scrooge’s reclamation.

9:18-24:28 — Scrooge’s Forgotten Self

● The ghost takes Scrooge to a familiar rural town where Scrooge recognizes the faces of people as they
pass and recollects the way back to his old school.
o Inside the school, Scrooge and the ghost find Scrooge’s younger self, a lonely boy reading
in an empty school room. Scrooge weeps to see his forgotten self.
o By learning to love himself, Scrooge is beginning to open himself to those around him.
o Scrooge also witnesses the imagination of his boyhood self, which reawakens a childlike
wonder in him.
o Scrooge and the Ghost then see the boy Scrooge, slightly older but still at school, as his
sister—Fred’s mother—arrives to bring him home.
● The ghost then takes Scrooge to the shop where Scrooge had been apprenticed as a young clerk.

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 o Upon seeing his old master, Mr. Fezziwig, Scrooge cries out in excitement, “Why, it’s old
Fezziwig! Bless his heart; it’s Fezziwig alive again!”
o Young Scrooge and his fellow-clerk, Dick, help prepare Fezziwig’s shop for a Christmas
ball and the older Scrooge is drawn out of himself as he recollects the joy and happiness
that he experienced with Fezziwig and Dick.
o Dickens provides a description of Fezziwig’s calves: “A positive light appeared to issue
from Fezziwig’s calves. They shone in every part of the dance like moons.”
o Scrooge is learning to appreciate the little things. The smallest, most mundane things are
a source of wonder that demonstrate the gratuitousness of reality.
● While watching the ball, Scrooge behaves like a man out of his wits. He is experiencing ecstasy—a
standing outside of himself—as he opens up to love and to the joy of life.

24:29-34:55 — Belle
● The ghost next shows Scrooge the painful scene of his fiancée, Belle, breaking off their engagement.
o Belle accuses Scrooge of replacing her with a golden idol, but it is not simple greed. At the
heart of Scrooge’s pursuit of wealth is fear.
o “You fear the world too much,” Belle says to Scrooge. His avarice is spurred by a desire to
control his world.
● After this scene, Scrooge begs to see no more, but the ghost takes him to an even more painful scene
of Belle’s later family—the still beautiful Belle with a younger version of herself, her daughter, sitting
on the knee of Belle’s husband.
● Scrooge cannot bear this vision of what could have been his own life. He wrestles with the ghost and
uses its night cap as an extinguisher to put out its light.
● Scrooge’s past forced itself into his present life and demanded that he reconnect with it.
o By closing himself off to the world, including to his own past, Scrooge tried to live outside
of time as though he could control time itself.
o Now he is forced to admit that he is an historical character who changes over time, and
still can change in the future.

Discussion Questions

What does Dickens’ description of the Ghost of Christmas Past reveal about the nature of the past?

Why must Scrooge learn to love his past?

Why does Dickens focus on Fezziwig’s calves?

What is significant about Scrooge wrestling with the ghost?

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Notes

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