Over the span of five posts, I am looking at Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, a wonderful story about the dramatic process to effect one man’s complete change of heart. Dickens arranged the novella into five chapters or staves, as he labeled them. “Stave” has its roots in the word “staff,” as in a musical staff, and his carefully chosen term reminds us that Dickens really did envision this work like a musical piece, a carol that could illuminate some of the meaning attached to the season of Christmas.  Each post will look at one stave and some of the beauty and meaning wrapped up in the words.

That Scrooge is a miser is understood immediately when one begins A Christmas Carol. What is less apparent is how he got that way. Stave two of Dickens’ classic Christmas tale brings that into focus for us. Much like the house metaphor discussed in the first post, Scrooge has lost his way. He wasn’t always the grasping, greedy skinflint he is when we meet him. 

The Ghost of Christmas Past takes him first to two scenes from his childhood, specifically the school where Scrooge spent several lonely Christmases. The school itself is “ancient” and described as being “associated. . . with too much getting up by candlelight, and not too much to eat.” We sense immediately that this is a school that would immediately offend today’s sensibilities about child rearing and education. A tiny, pitiful Scrooge is there by himself after all the other children have been called home. We are given another clue about the route that led Scrooge to become a miser when the ghost shows him another Christmas at the same boarding school, several years later. This time, we meet Scrooge’s sister who has come to take Scrooge home because “father is ever so much kinder than he used to be.” We see the extent of the deprivation Scrooge has known all his young life: physical and emotional poverty have been the refrain he knows by heart.

These foundational pieces explain much when the ghost shows Scrooge a moment in time many years later, when Scrooge is an adult. As we watch a tender, romantic relationship crumble, we are told that Scrooge’s face “wear(s) the signs of care and avarice.” The word “care” here is not to be understood as compassion or love. Instead, it is to be understood as the weighted state of mind that comes from fear and anxiety. And “avarice” is an old fashioned way of expressing greed. I believe that the first leads to the second. Scrooge’s younger years have created a fear in him–a fear of poverty, a fear of emotions, a fear of connection and loss. These fears have initiated a series of stop-gap measures in him to  address those fears. In fact, the young woman who is ending their relationship even tells Scrooge, “‘You fear the world too much.’” Underneath the stiff, hardened shell that Scrooge wears is a tender heart very much afraid of being without. 

Though Scrooge begs the ghost to stop showing him such painful moments, the fact that Scrooge finds them painful is good news. He even remarks to the spirit that he wishes he had done some things differently the day leading up to this bizarre journey. There is hope for him. Our narrator leads us to believe that Scrooge may not be lost forever.