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Note: the following article on Gothic immortality in A Christmas Carol is a modified excerpt (pp. 63-64) from my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which can be downloaded (for free) from the repository of the Tampere University Press. For a list of my other academic publications, see the relevant page on the main website.

(Note: Also take a look at the article on immortality in Bram Stoker’s Dracula)

The complexity of Gothic immortality is apparent in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, which arguably still remains an under-analyzed, deceptively simple text. Perhaps due to the rather jovial mood of the story – and certainly of the implied outcome – certain important Gothic devices can pass unnoticed. That is especially true for issues pertaining to temporality, reality, and immortality.

Gothic Immortality in A Christmas Carol: Death is Serious Business

Death is a very important business in A Christmas Carol. The beginning of the text makes this very clear indeed:

Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good upon ’Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail. (CC 1)

The obvious conflict arises for the reader immediately, as the title of this first section is “Marley’s Ghost”. Hence the text immediately questions the inevitability and non-reversibility of death.

In fact, the narrator goes a step further and announces that it is of the highest importance to realize that Marley was indeed dead, otherwise “nothing wonderful can come of the story” (CC 2). Scrooge himself appears unable to believe his very eyes when he sees his old business partner’s ghost.

The specter asks him directly whether the old man believes in what he is seeing, and old Scrooge emphatically replies that he does not, distrusting his own senses, as they can be affected by the most trivial things (CC 18) – a very explicitly made point regarding the nature of reality, an issue that will become particularly interesting later on.

In a stereotypically Gothic manner, the ghost of Marley warns Scrooge that after his death he was doomed to roam around the earth, unable to find peace, with the reason being that he had misused his life. Marley’s ghost, full of regret, warns Scrooge that he will be haunted by three other ghosts, without the visits of which he will be cursed into the same kind of hapless immortality that Marley himself was (CC 13).

On Gothic Immortality and The Metaphysics of Consciousness

However, along the course of the story, certain elements seem to add complexity to Marley’s seemingly clear and simple warning. A typical example is when Scrooge and the first Spirit, that of Christmas Past, visit the old miser’s young self.

As if in a dream, Scrooge sees the warehouse where he worked as an apprentice and exclaims seeing his old boss: “Why, it’s old Fezziwig! Bless his heart; it’s Fezziwig alive again!” (CC 30). Fezziwig’s apparent resurrection is of course of an entirely different metaphysical status than Marley’s.

The latter version of immortality entailed consciousness, as Scrooge was able to discourse with his former business partner. Now, however, he can only be a passive viewer.

Much like reading a novel (or, anachronistically but more aptly, like watching a film), the old man watches a world richly populated by characters, including his own younger self, that nonetheless do not seem to possess the same kind of self-awareness and consciousness he does. The Spirit is explicit on this matter, reminding him that “[t]hese are but shadows of the things that have been … They have no consciousness of us” (CC 27).

Gothic Immortality in A Christmas Carol: The Temporal Element

The temporal element is important here, and poses several metaphysical questions in regard to the nature of reality and consciousness – with immortality being always implicitly present in this discourse.

The Spirit’s words remind Scrooge and the reader that these characters are neither real nor unreal. In a TodorovianCheck the section on the ontological differences between Gothic, horror, and science fiction. framework, these characters are not real in the same way Scrooge is, because they are construed as the long-gone past.

However, at the same time, they are not portrayed as an illusion of the senses, either. Despite Scrooge’s earlier attempt (CC 18) to dismiss everything as a bad dream caused by indigestion, his attempt ends in failure as “[t]he more he thought, the more perplexed he was” (CC 23).

The only separating line is that of time. The characters’ inability to communicate and interact with extratemporal beings (as Scrooge and the Spirit effectively are in this context) assures that there is no possibility for a so-called grandfather paradox.

Scrooge cannot warn his former self and thus change history. He cannot undo the mistakes of the past, and he is deeply aware of this. Tormented by the things he sees, he asks the Spirit to remove him from this reality. The Spirit repeats that these are but shadows, “they are what they are” (CC 37).

At this point, the text seems to imply a differentiation between consciousness and a qualitative dissimilarity in metaphysical status. In other words, although these shadows do not possess consciousness (at least from Scrooge’s point of view), it becomes obvious that they cannot be dismissed as fiction either. They are very real, and the old man’s emotional reaction proves the point. 

Read more: Angelis, Christos. “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic. Doctoral Dissertation. Tampere, Finland: Tampere University Press, 2017. Available from the repository of the Tampere University Press.

Works Cited

Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol. London: Penguin Books, 1994. (cited as CC)