Greetings! Here’s is your post for today. Two days before Christmas! Yikes!
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A Christmas Carol: In Prose Being a Ghost Story of Christmas by Charles Dickens, 1843
“It’s likely to be a very cheap funeral,” said the same speaker; “For upon my life I don’t know of anybody to go to it. Suppose we make up a party and volunteer?”
“I don’t mind going if a lunch is provided,” observed the gentleman with the escrescence on his nose. “But I must be fed, if I make one.”
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shows Scrooge several businessmen discussing someone’s death and funeral. He later discovers it’s his own.
* * *
Far in this den of infamous resort, there was a low-browed, beetling shop, below a pent-house roof, where iron, old rags, bottles, bones and greasy offal, were bought. Upon the floor within, were piled up heaps of rusty keys, nails, chains, hinges, files, scales, weights, and refuse iron of all kinds. Secrets that few would like to scrutinise were bred and hidden in mountains of unseemly rags, masses of corrupted fat, and sepulchres of bones.
Not a very nice pawn shop, is it?
* * *
They were very quiet again. At last she said, and in a steady, cheerful voice, that only faltered once:
“I have known him walk with—I have know him walk with Tiny Tim upon his shoulder, very fast indeed . . . But he was very light to carry,” she resumed, intent upon her work, “and his father loved him so, that it was no trouble: no trouble.”
Mrs. Cratchit reminisces about Tiny Tim. The grief is close, for the child’s body is laid out upstairs.
* * *
“I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach. Oh, tell me I may sponge away the writing on this stone!”
This is the turning point in Scrooge’s attitude, although you see it coming throughout his encounters with the Ghosts. I hope I haven’t spoiled the ending for you.
* * *
His hands were busy with his garments all this time; turning them inside out, putting them on upside down, tearing them, mislaying them, making them parties to every kind of extravagance.
“I don’t know what to do!” cried Scrooge, laughing and crying in the same breath; and making a perfect Laocoӧn of himself with his stockings.
Scrooge has transformed after his encounters with Jacob Marley and the Christmas Ghosts. He’s so excited that he doesn’t even know what to do when he’s dressing. Laocoӧn was a Trojan priest killed with his sons by two sea serpents after warning the Trojans against the Trojan horse. I have no idea how this word fits into this description.
* * *
Really, for a man who had been out of practice for so many years, it was a splendid laugh, a most illustrious laugh. The father of a long-long line of brilliant laughs!
Scrooge laughing? He’s absolutely bonkers, but in a good way.
* * *
The chuckle with which he said this, and the chuckle with which he paid for the Turkey, and the chuckle with which he paid for the cab, and the chuckle with which he recompensed the boy, were only to be exceeded by the chuckle with which he sat down breathless in his chair again, and chuckled till he cried.
It’s been an exhausting day for old Scrooge. He’s as used to laughing as he is to kindness, Dickens uses repetition to drive home his point.
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I’ll be posting on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Please join me then.
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