The Whole Haunted World #9
"The air was filled with phantoms": the (ghostly) story behind the creation of A Christmas Carol
“Marley was dead: to begin with.”
Those are the first six words of the Charles Dickens classic A Christmas Carol. Dickens evidently wanted us to know right from the beginning that his novella (it runs just over 28,500 words) was a ghost story. A Christmas Carol may reference the holiday in the title, but the actual text starts with something darker (and that first section - Dickens used the musical term “stave” for his sections - is sub-titled “Marley’s Ghost”).
On top of which, check out Dickens’s preface to A Christmas Carol:
“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, and no one wish to lay it.”
Why do I mention all this? Because upon recently investigating the history behind how Dickens created A Christmas Carol, I was surprised to find little attention paid by scholars and critics to the ghost angle. Most of the analyses of A Christmas Carol that’s been published over the last 180 years has focused on its importance as a Christmas tale, its social commentary, or its autobiographical elements.
So, without further adieu..let’s talk about why A Christmas Carol is one of the all-time great ghost stories (possibly the greatest), and how Dickens crafted his remarkable achievement.
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