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.

In stave four, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come visits Scrooge. He offers no commentary to the scenes he shows Scrooge; he leaves the interpretation entirely up to Scrooge himself. Scrooge is a sharp student, though, and needs no further explanation. Even before he figures out that the dead man discussed in all the dismal scenes is him, he can see that the man isn’t mourned. No one is upset by his departure; in fact, a family that has taken out a loan through Scrooge is actually hopeful that the new lienholder will be more gracious than Scrooge was. These ripple effects from his death are what torture Scrooge.

As was mentioned in the first post, this novella has made readers through the years speculate that Dickens was rewriting a parable from the New Testament. The biblical parable pictures a man in hell asking for someone to warn his family to change their ways before they die and meet the same doom as he has. While the man in the parable is denied his request, we see that Dickens imagines Marley being granted permission to warn his colleague in life, Scrooge. And while in the first stave Scrooge is told that his eternal state will mimic Marley’s, the novella doesn’t spend much space picturing the other-worldly doom that awaits spirits such as theirs.

Instead, the story focuses on the physical world and what life will look like for everyone else when Scrooge dies. This is yet another departure from the biblical parable because Scrooge doesn’t change just because he fears eternal damnation. Scrooge changes because he wants to rewrite the images of daily life he is shown by the Ghost of Christmas Yet to come. The thought that he missed an opportunity to improve others’ lives is too much for him. He pleads with the spirit, “‘Assure me that I may yet change these shadows you have shown me, by an altered life!’”

This is the moment of Scrooge’s rebirth. His change of heart and mind are so drastic in this moment that we could say that this is when Scrooge truly began to live. For all of Dickens’ own crankiness and cynicism–Scrooge bears some resemblance to his creator–he still felt that redemption was possible, and that Christmas was a moment in our collective lives that might demonstrate that kind of powerful change.