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December 19, 2008 -- Charles Dickens wrote a series of what the called his "Christmas Books" (aptly named because that is exactly what they are). I promised a few weeks ago that I would read some of the books for Christmas. This is a very easy promise to keep, an absolute pleasure to fulfill. Yesterday I read The Haunted Man and The Ghost's Bargain: not the catchiest of titles but a gem of a book.
The ghosts in this book are many. First, there is the phantom double of our lead character, Mr.Redlaw, who appears evenings at the heart. One Christmas Eve the phantom urges our man towards what seems to be a welcome release from the unhappiness that weighs so heavily on his shoulders. Redlaw is given and takes the opportunity to forget forever all sorrows he suffers and all wrongs done against him. But this is no gift and certainly no bargain: as Redlaw loses his memory of all sorrows and wrongs, he feels himself becoming hardened and pitiless and still unhappy, although now it is unhappiness felt coldly, and most chillingingly spread to others. He becomes the typhoid Mary of misery, spreading selfishnes and pettiness and meanness to whomever he touches.
The other ghosts in this book, so marvelously presented, are never given names or distinct faces. Rather, they are shadows "released" (I love that use of verb; the animation of the dark into something that moves; like light flows, so does the dark) by twilight, having been "prisoned up all day...[and] now closed in and gathered like mustering swarms of ghosts." Ghosts they are, ghosts of past joys and sorrows, of "forms and faces from the past, from the grave, from the deep, deep gulf, where the things that might have been and never were, are always wandering." These ghosts appear to all of us, as they appear to poor Redlaw by the fire; "I saw them in the fire, but now. They come back to me in music, in the wind, in the dead stillness of the night, in the revolving years." But when he makes the bargain with his phantom double, the shadows leave him completely. And what is left in their place? He is a scientist, but he realizes too late that Nature abhors a vacumn and will rush to fill a void.
I will not give away the twists of the plot but I can let slip one word: forgivness. This word reappears in my reading (and my writings after the reading) again and again. What a word of wisdom it is!
Dickens is as moving (to tears, my dears, to tears) as ever and as funny as ever as well, with the loving and chaotic Tetterby family providing much comic relief. The youngest of the family, a monstrosity of a baby girl, is the charge of young Johnny who is habitually crushed under her weight, chewed through by her teething of teeth that never come, and run ragged by her caterwauling -- and yet he loves her so.
My volume of The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain, also contains the Christmas story "The Story of the Goblins Who Stole A Sexton", which relates the alarming events of a certain Christmas Eve. We are introduced to a nasty Church sexton who would rather dig a grave on Christmas Eve than partake of Christmas cheer ("feeling very low he thought it might raise his spirits perhaps if he went on with his work at once" ). This man is so mean-spirited that only thoughts of the local children catching "measles, scarlet-fever, thrush, hooping-cough, and a good many other sources of consolation" can put him in the "happy frame of mind" to start digging. Have no fear, the old curmudgeon is set to rights by the visit of a troop of extremely athletic goblins. The descriptions of the church yard, the old sexton and the youthful victims of his enmity, as well as of these vicious but hilarious goblins are pure Dickens, accurate and true and perfectly rendered (okay, I have never seen a goblin or an English church yard but these are better than real: they are perfect). For example, "The snow lay hard and crisp upon the ground, and spread over the thickly-strewn mounds of earth, so white and smooth a cover, that it seemed as if corpses lay there, hidden only by their winding sheets." And: "[T]he sexton observed for one instant a brilliant illumination within the windows of the church as if the whole building were lighted up; it disappeared, the organ pealed forth a lively air, and whole troops of goblins, the very counterpart of the first one, poured into the churchyard, and began playing art leap frog with the tombstones..."
May the kindliest of ghost and goblins appear to you this holiday season. Forgive and be kind and let the music begin!
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