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.
