The Man Who Invented Christmas by Les Standiford

Author:Les Standiford [Les Standiford]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 0100-12-31T22:00:00+00:00

11.

You fear the world too much,” Ebenezer Scrooge’s fiancée tells him when she breaks off their engagement. “All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach.”

More than one commentator has suggested that in this fictional exchange Dickens is also speaking obliquely of himself and his own fears and doubts. Though an outside observer might have thought that a person of Dickens’s accomplishments would have left behind such feelings forever, he was clearly still burdened with quite ordinary concerns. Given his current uncertainties—both artistic and economic—A Christmas Carol could easily be read as an allegory for his own life: a once-successful man receives a final opportunity to redeem himself.

Certainly, Dickens was well aware of how the deprivations of a childhood, monetary or otherwise, could have profound effects later in life. While the works of William James and Sigmund Freud were still a half-century away, Wordsworth’s lines had been around since 1802:

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