Any adult Victorian would have been familiar with this phenomenon. When the ghost displays this to Scrooge, it is tangible proof that it is a real phantom, and of someone well known to him. The dropping of the ghost’s jaw starts the opening of Scrooge’s mind. The ghost’s first act is to continue the work of the portly gentlemen—to smash Scrooge’s barrier of self-constructed ignorance. It informs Scrooge: “It is required of every man ... that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men” (p. 23). Scrooge’s delight in alienation is contrary to what he is called upon to do simply by being a human being. Dickens does not require that everyone wander physically into areas of danger and disease, but he does insist that it is necessary for at least our imaginations to go there. When Scrooge, appalled at the misery of his former partner in business and in mind-set, cries, “But you always were a good man of business,” the Ghost retorts: “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!” (p. 24). Dickens denies the idea that somehow one’s work and one’s morality can be separated, that the world of making money somehow exists independently of the social situation in which it dwells and to which it contributes. There is no escape through that route.

Perhaps the most striking thing about Marley’s Ghost is its departure. It leaves through the window, and Scrooge, pursuing, looks out and for a while sees and hears a multitude of spirits, wailing in tormented remorse. The spirit world, like the world of poverty, is around us all the time, whether we are cognizant of it or not.

The first Spirit (as opposed to a ghost of a real person) to appear is the Ghost of Christmas Past. There is good psychological sense to this, not mere clockwork chronology Just as, through the visit of Scrooge’s nephew, Dickens demonstrates that Scrooge’s antipathy to Christmas is not a matter of money, so in order to bring Scrooge out of his spiritual morass he must be brought back to a time before he had money: The root issue must be sought. The Spirit’s grip is ineluctable—do not we all know the irresistible pull of the past, that thing or moment we remember and wish we could not, or recall and wish we could relive? Note, too, that the Spirit’s most striking characteristic is light; previously we have seen Scrooge, in every situation, surrounded by darkness. This Spirit has a “bright clear jet of light” springing from its head. When it leads Scrooge toward the window, he protests he is “liable to fall.” “‘Bear but a touch of my hand there,’ said the Spirit, laying it upon his heart, ‘and you shall be upheld in more than this!’ ” (p. 31).

Instantly Scrooge finds himself in the country of his childhood, and in the daylight: “The darkness and the mist had vanished.” Moreover, he is delighted. The Spirit has worked upon his heart and carried him back before the time when his opinions were set, to the time when they were still forming.

In the films of A Christmas Carol, very little is made of Scrooge at school. But in the written story, the recollection of his boyhood existence opens Scrooge up. Left behind by his fellow students, he imagines the characters of books passing by. The scene exposes Scrooge’s imagination, both to the reader and to Scrooge himself For the first time, we see Scrooge expressing pity. Though it is for himself as a boy, in a sense it is not self-pity but the first drop of genuine thought for another human being, and it leads him directly to think of a boy who had tried to regale him with a Christmas carol that very evening, and Scrooge now wishes he had acted differently. The reclamation of Scrooge cannot happen by an appeal to the adult concept of money and its uses, but only by a reopening of Scrooge’s heart and mind, by the use of his imagination to extend beyond himself.

The young Scrooge is rescued from his misery by a child, his younger sister, but thereafter he quickly casts aside the qualities of childhood: eagerness and imagination and courage. He passes from the daylight of his childhood to the “evening” surrounding his young adulthood. In Fezziwig’s ball, we have one of the most delightful pieces of Dickensian writing: joy and humor and description piled one upon the other, a real party of writing, just as the writing describes the party.