The Ghost of Christmas Past (Stave 2).  

Scrooge – the money man – is about controlling the world, making himself invulnerable to its caprices. This conditions his total embrace of mechanical time, for capitalism would not have been possible without the clock and the abstract measurement of time.  He is almost terrified at the loss of control represented through mechanical time being replaced by a kind of spiritual time. 

   The description of the Ghost of Christmas Past – Scrooge’s past in particular – is weird, combining opposites (youth and age, strength and frailty) with constant mutations. I suppose I agree with the Professor, who reads the ghost and his physical qualities as an image of the past itself. The past doesn’t change in a factual sense, but its meaning certainly does change with increasing insight or blindness as one’s life takes its course. To take a trivial example, as a young man I had ceased to be aware of my failure to help around the house; as an older man with children, it comes back to me, and I understand what it meant for my mother to have to do it all alone. I would say: I only understand the meaning of that part of the past today; before I was blind to it. 

     The relation of Scrooge to his past is important in that to be Scrooge he had had to cut his past off, to exist in a history-less present. To be a rock, an island, Scrooge had to deny the child in him; to block out all light that he was gifted in his past. His fear of the world is easy to understand given what is revealed to us readers. He was neglected and abandoned by his father after his mother’s early death. He was sent to a love-less boarding school where he experienced the full pain of abandonment and loneliness. The complete vulnerability of the child to such blows gives rise to the narcissistic drive to protect that child, to build walls around it to keep it safe. Scrooge’s adult life is one form those walls can take.

    But there was also light in his past. The imaginative stories that comforted him during the lonely time at the boarding school; his beloved sister Fan; perhaps his father’s remorse and attempts to make amends; the goodness and joy of Fezziwig; the pure love of his fiancé. And we know he was able to respond to this light through the child-like joy as well as the remorse that comes out of him – feeling from an unfeeling man – while being confronted with this past. We only learn, during the scene in which his fiancé breaks with him, that for reasons unknown he has rejected the sources of light in his life and chosen to let his fear of the world determine his life. Perhaps the death of his beloved sister contributed to this?

 

“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….”

 

Greed is in the service of quelling the fear of the world, the world now understood as the loveless world, the world that threatens and hurts the child, the world of his abandonment. The money he seeks is for the walls about that child. There are many ways to build walls – many forms of narcissism. For Scrooge, a child of capitalism, it is greed.

     For Scrooge, greed is a sign of increased wisdom:

 

“What then?” he retorted. “Even if I have grown so much wiser, what then? I am not changed toward you.” She shook her head.

 Wisdom is a function of what a person takes to be reality. For this Scrooge, “reality” is the world as it is without love, without the light that he himself has experienced and which he now has to deny and repress to get on with the project of wall construction. His denial of that part of his life under the pressure of an interpretation of reality that justifies his pursuit of gain as the only good – Greed is good – conditions what “wisdom” means for him now. “You are changed” his fiancé tells him, indicating that he chose in a sense to become the Scrooge that he became.

 

“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….”

Marriage is a fateful act of self-giving in ignorance of the future. Scrooge can no longer love, which is to say that he can no longer give himself. His self has become a fortress that he own and guards. So again, what makes something valuable is a function of what one takes the world to be. At some point during their relationship, Scrooge committed himself to wall construction. To do that he had to cut that part of his life off that had responded to light, to love. Thus he had to alienate himself from the most essential part of his past: his love of imaginative literature, of Fan, of Fezziwig and all he represented, and of his fiancé.

    Healing required putting Scrooge back into a relationship with his younger self – of breaking down the walls so that the child, the brother, and the lover could be free. The ghost says to Scrooge: “Rise and walk with me!” – a clear allusion to John 5:8 where it is related how Jesus healed a man at the pool of Bethesda:

 

And a certain man was there, which had an infirmity thirty and eight years. When Jesus saw him lie, and knew that he had been now a long time in that case, he saith unto him, Wilt thou be made whole? The impotent man answered him, Sir, I have no man, when the water is troubled, to put me into the pool: but while I am coming, another steppeth down before me. Jesus saith unto him, Rise, take up thy bed, and walk. And immediately the man was made whole, and took up his bed, and walked: and on the same day was the sabbath.

 

The ghost is there to heal Scrooge by putting him back into a relationship with his younger self, a relationship of love. The goal is for Scrooge to love the boy and the young man he squashed to make his new self-sufficient-self possible. The process begins immediately:

 

“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.

 

He is forced throughout this stave to get out of his present state of soul, and respond to these key aspects of his past, relive the joys as well as suffer the remorse for his decisions. Both the joys and the pain are necessary. He gets out of himself and reenters moods of affirmation. He blesses Fezziwig’s heart – an innocent turn of speech but blessing is also a deep mode of affirmation. He doesn’t bless anybody or anything in his counting house. This reentering a mode of consciousness natural to his younger self but alien to his present self makes his past real, as it can only be when experienced from the inside.

     He is confronted with his present actions, seen now in light of his response to his past. He thinks of the children singing carols he was rude to; of Cratchit when reliving his time as a clerk with Fezziwig; and the sting of guilt over his treatment of his nephew when recalling the death of his beloved sister. Thus Dickens pictures how our relationship to our past self conditions our relationships to others in the present. This is not some Freudian psycho-therapeutic method of restoring equilibrium to the psychic mechanism; it is a purely spiritual phenomenon, disclosing a robust view of human nature as thriving in the light of love, withering in the darkness of the absence of love.

     The professor comments on the seemingly odd treatment of Fezziwig’s calves.

 

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, as any given time, what would become of them next. . . .

This is a strange thing to focus on, but the Professor makes sense of it in this way: the little things that don't matter in the counting-house – like Fezziwig’s calves shining in this jubilant dance –  are revelatory; to see the calves in the right way, in all particularity, requires Scrooge to be drawn outside of himself, to attend to particular features of reality in the light of joy, to develop the capacity to see the life that comes from calves is to be open to the gift of reality, and the beauty of reality. Happiness is not a matter of addition and subtraction; it rises above any cause. It is a kind of grace.

 That hits the right note. I am grateful to the professor to uncovering depths of this story that had eluded me for many years