Time: Winter, First Year
The Class: English 150: Time Travel Narratives (or something like that)
The Assignment: Analyse the use of time in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Probably I also had to use the terms story, discourse, order, frequency, and duration. (Though you’re likely familiar with the general plot, you may wish to read the novel (it’s very short) or a summary before continuing.)
Final Draft
Shadows of the Past, Perils of the Present, and the Evitability of the Future: Time and Didacticism in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is a story about ghosts and greed, love and life, family and friendship, and, of course, Christmas. Most importantly, it is a story about change. Scrooge goes to sleep a humbuggy old miser, and wakes up as jolly as Old Saint Nick himself. The meat of the story is what happens in between. No change was wrought in Scrooge in all the years since Marley’s death, nor in many years before that, but in this one fantastic evening, he is transformed. They say time changes everything, and it is Dickens’s manipulation of time which manipulates Scrooge, and attempts to manipulate the reader.
For the change to be truly fantastic, and for Dickens’s message to come across in full force, he must establish in the first stave that Scrooge in fact has not changed, and cannot change under his own power. He does this in a few ways. Firstly, he points out that “Scrooge’s name was good upon the ‘Change,” i.e. he was dependable, at least in matters of business; someone not likely prone to whimsy and deleterious self-reflection, and someone who has been doing the same thing long enough to have built up a reputation (Dickens, 39). Secondly, he shows that Scrooge has barely any reaction to the death of his business partner. He does not change the sign, and he does not even correct people when they call him Marley. Finally, he says that “the cold within [Scrooge] froze his old feature…. He carried his own low temperature always about with him” (Dickens, 40). By describing Scrooge as frozen, Dickens is saying that he will only change when subject to an external force, a metaphorical heat. This, of course, comes from the three Ghosts.
The fact that these three agents of change are Ghosts is important when considering Dickens’s take on time travel. Yes, they represent the times from which they take their titles, but they are Ghosts of those times, not the times themselves. When Scrooge travels with them, he is not so much traveling to those times as he is viewing them. For example, he is not really present among the environs of his past, as “'[t]hey are but shadows of the things that have been’” (Dickens, 64). The present and future are likewise incorporeal to him. This does not necessarily mean, however, that there is no actual time travel in A Christmas Carol. We are still faced with the question of how all of these events could have happened in one night. We must reconcile the differences between the story and the discourse, i.e. the differences between the chronological order of events from an outside view and the order of events from the narration’s point of view.
There are three aspects of a narrative that authors commonly manipulate to achieve such a difference: the order in which events are related (order); the number of times an event is narrated (frequency); and the amount of time it takes to narrate an event (duration). Because Scrooge doesn’t actually travel to the past or future, Dickens does not manipulate order in that regard, since the actual event that is being narrated in those instances is Scrooge viewing the past or future, not the events of the past or future themselves. However, Scrooge keeps waking up before he fell asleep. In the first stave, when he wakes up it is clearly night (although he tries to convince himself otherwise using logic that makes no sense whatsoever), and the clock strikes twelve, even though “it was past two when he went to bed” (Dickens, 60). Likewise, in the second stave Scrooge wakes up just before the stroke of one, and it is still night. And at the end of the third stave, the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come appears at the stroke of midnight – on the same night. So which aspect has been changed? Duration wouldn’t account for it, as the pace of the narration fits the pace of the action. Neither would frequency, because the events are different each time. Rather, Dickens changes the order of events, and in a peculiar way, by having all of the Ghostly visits happen on the same night, yet not at the same time.
So, is this time travel? Scrooge does seem to be traveling back in time each time he falls asleep. It could be that the whole thing is a dream. If it is supernatural, perhaps the Ghosts somehow remove him from time in order that he might learn his lesson. Or, perhaps he does actually time travel. It doesn’t really matter, in the end. Dickens is less concerned with how (or whether) Scrooge travels in time, and more concerned with what the three different times can teach us. Dickens uses each of the Ghosts to relay the significance of each time, to remind us that we can learn from our past, present, and future, and that these lessons are necessary for change to take place, lest we remain frozen.
First, the Ghost of Christmas Past takes Scrooge through events from his childhood and young adulthood that he had long forgotten (also one event that he was not even aware of, because Dickens seems to delight in being inconsistent so long as it suits his purpose). We often think that the past is a permanent part of us; both in the sense that all of our previous experiences have gone into making us who we are, and in the sense that the effect of those experiences is singular, that they do what they do and then they are simply memories. Dickens, however, gives us a different picture. Scrooge is clearly changed by his sojourn down memory lane (plus the stopover at his ex-girlfriend’s house). He is not quite at the point of running out the door and buying turkeys for everyone, but it does make some small changes. He wishes he had given something to the boy who was caroling at his door after seeing his own boyhood self. He is made uneasy at the thought of how treated his nephew after seeing his sister, and begins to regret his treatment of Bob Cratchit when he remembers how well his master treated him. Most importantly, he is primed to absorb the teachings of the other Ghosts. They say we have perfect vision in hindsight, and that certainly seems to be true for Scrooge, but the main problem seems to be getting ourselves to look back in the first place, and then actually understanding what we see and changing accordingly. This is what Dickens is trying to get us to do. He is telling us that even though the past might be painful to think of, we must confront it, so that what we see in the past might make us take a close look at the present.
This leads directly into Dickens’s lesson in the third stave: live in the present. Be aware of the people around, and try to understand them. Also, rather than save only for the future, you should try to improve the present situation, and not merely for yourself, but for others as well. This is made most clear at the end of the stave, when the Ghost of Christmas Present brings out the two allegorical children, Ignorance and Want, and tells Scrooge to “'[b]eware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy [Ignorance]’” (Dickens, 101).
Following this dire warning, Scrooge is visited by the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come. Now, clearly Dickens is not suggesting what we can learn from our own futures, because most of us can’t actually see our future. Instead, Dickens uses the fourth stave to show us the consequences of not learning from the past and the present. Cleverly, for this is a Christmas story, he even more overtly encapsulates the teachings of the Ghosts within the idea of Christmas, when Scrooge says he “’will honor Christmas in [his] heart and try to keep it all the year’” (Dickens, 117).
This is the part of Dickens’s message that might be easy to miss. Yes, Christmas is a time for reflection. Yes, it is a time for kindness and understanding towards your fellow human beings. Yes, Christmas is a time when we can find warmth in the cold winter, a warmth that will hopefully have the power to melt whatever evil parts of ourselves have frozen within us. But Dickens is saying that Christmas time should not just be once a year – Christmas time should be all time.
Grade: Something in the B range, I think?
Professor’s Comments: So here’s where I admit the fundamental flaw in this series: I don’t actually have nearly as many of the graded, commented-on copies of my essays as I thought I did when I came up with this idea. Hopefully these can be useful anyway.
My Comments:
Response papers can sometimes feel like busywork, but they can be great for starting to work out ideas that will end up in a longer essay later on. As you can see from the two response papers below, there are a couple big ideas in here that I’d already developed ahead of time. That was especially helpful for this essay, as I didn’t really know how to craft a thesis statement (and as you can see from Office Hours #1, I never really learned), so instead I just wrote around the two points I already knew I wanted to make, inserting transition sentences to make it seem like I was knew where I was going.
If you’re really stuck for a thesis but have a couple good ideas, this isn’t a terrible strategy for fleshing those out into a full paper. You’re likely not going to get an A out of it, though, at least not without significant revision, which I never had time for as I was usually finishing papers the night (or occasionally morning) before they were due.
Other than that there’s not much else to say about this one. There’s some decent analysis here, even if it’s not especially deep. It’s structurally weak—the thesis changes multiple times before the end—but at least the conclusion isn’t a complete non-sequitur from that first paragraph (mostly because after I wrote the conclusion I went back and added that last clause to thesis statement). It’s not the strongest part of the essay though, and doesn’t actually bring together any of the other points I’d made.
For my first attempt at writing an English essay with more than 5 paragraphs, it definitely could have been worse.
Other observations:
- Clearly my title format did not change in four years
- “The meat of the story is what happens in between.” NO, REALLY?
- Somehow between Response Paper 2 and the final essay I changed my mind about how frequency was working in the story. In retrospect I’m pretty sure I was right the first time, that it’s the same night repeated multiple times, just with different events each time. I think past me was confused by those differences, but present me has played several roguelikes, so I get it.
Pre-Production
Response Paper 1
We often think that the past is a permanent part of us; both in the sense that all of our previous experiences have gone into making us who we are, and in the sense the effect of those experiences is singular, that they do what they do and then they are simply memories. In A Christmas Carol, however, Dickens gives us a different picture. Scrooge, who is inarguably a crotchety, miserly old man, is considerably changed by his visit to the past, a past that he had apparently not thought about for quite sometime. They say we have 20/20 vision in hindsight, and that certainly seems to be true for Scrooge, but the main problem seems to be getting ourselves to look back in the first place, and then actually understanding what we see and changing accordingly.
This is also one of the places where the text differed from my expectations. For some reason I had it in my head that Scrooge reverted to his usual humbugery after each of the first two visits, and it was not until the last one that he was permanently changed. Considering all of the biblical references Dickens makes just in the first stave, this does not seem to be an entirely unreasonable assumption, as it parallels rather neatly the repeated hardening of Pharaoh’s heart after each plague. After peeking ahead to check, however, I found that the changes wrought in Scrooge by his sojourn down memory lane appear to be permanent, and in fact he seems eager to go on the next journey with the Ghost of Christmas Present, and learn what lessons that journey might provide.
Another place that the text was different than hat I expected was in the opening scene, specifically the fact that, in that entire scene, indeed, in the whole first two staves, he never names Bob Cratchit, whereas in all the adaptations I’ve seen, Scrooge refers to him at least once as “Mr. Chratchit” when he’s yelling at him, and again when he thinks of him during his visit to the past. Having him never refer to Cratchit by name in that scene is a nice bit of characterization, and I don’t know that I would have noticed it if I hadn’t been expecting the opposite.
Response Paper 2
Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made Of
At first glance, the presence of time travel would appear to be represented in A Christmas Carol by the Ghosts. It is implied in the narrative, however, that the Ghosts aren’t actually traveling in time. Rather, they are merely showing Scrooge images of the various times. This is implied in a few ways. Firstly, the title of “Ghost” itself carries a sense of illusion. Secondly, Scrooge is never physically present in the other times. Thirdly, his “visit” to the past has the feel of augmented memory, since he sees various literary outside the window, and the scenes shift more fluidly than in the present or future.
We find out at the end that there has, in fact, been some manipulation of time, when Scrooge wakes up and discovers that what seemed like four nights was just the same night repeated four times. The question is, who was the one manipulating time: the Ghosts, or Dickens himself? Well, we’ve just seen that the Ghosts don’t actually seem able to manipulate time. So, it seems to me that perhaps Dickens is not just manipulating time, but manipulating the audience. I’ll come right out and say it: it was all a dream.
Let’s look at the facts: Scrooge goes to sleep. Weird stuff happens. Scrooge wakes up. The only reason we don’t immediately think it was a dream is because he wakes up and goes to sleep multiple times during the course of events. The fact remains that it all begins with him sleeping and ends with him waking up. Everything else is nested within those two actions.
Obviously, this doesn’t negate the possibility of supernatural forces. Even if it was all a dream, it was a very detailed one, and his vision of the present is proven to be more accurate than would be possible given only the knowledge he had when he went to sleep. And this certainly wouldn’t be the first literary example of supernatural beings working through dreams. It doesn’t even really matter, since Scrooge obviously believes he experienced everything while awake, and that’s what’s important.
Brainstorming Notes
- Ghosts
- “I have endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly…” (Dickens, 37).
- “Marley was dead: to begin with” (Dickens, 39).
- Ghosts of time
- Frozen
- “The cold within him froze his old features…. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog days; and didn’t thaw it one degree at christmas” (Dickens, 40)
- Never painted out Marley’s name (40)
- Christmas as birth/re-birth i.e. change, Scrooge doesn’t change
- Scrooge doesn’t change until change happens to Scrooge (melts)
- “Oh cold, cold, rigid, dreadful Death…” (Dickens, 109).
- No change is wrought in Scroodge in all his years of business with Marley, and yet in one night he has a complete reversal? That’s because it’s not one night?
- If we don’t change, we don’t grow. If we don’t grow, we aren’t really living. — Gail Sheehy
- Time
- Past – “…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” (Dickens, 62). “‘These are but shadows of the things that have been,’ said the Ghost” (Dickens, 64).
- Future – “It was shrouded in a deep black garment, which concealed its head, its face, its form, and left nothing of it visible save one outstretched hand. But for this it would have been difficult to detach its figure from the night, and seperate from the darkness by which it was surrounded” (Dickens, 102)
- Present – The most solid of the ghosts, but Scrooge still isn’t “present” when they travel.
- One night
- First time he wakes up, convinces himself it’s twelve noon not midnight (he went to bed at two), although his logic makes no sense. Spirit appears at strike of one.
- Second time, Spirit again appears at strike of one.
- Third time, Spirirt appears at midnight, not one (?)
- Always remember that the future comes one day at a time. – Dean Acheson
Certain of Eventual Failure 