The Themes of A Christmas Carol

3 Life as a Prison

The image of the world, and the life one lives in it, as a prison is a repeating metaphor in the work of Dickens. John Dickens, Charles Dickens's father, spent several years in Marshalsea Debtor's Prison and during part of this time Charles, then aged only twelve, was sent to work in a shoe-blacking factory. The literal imprisonment of his father combined with Charles' own sense of entrapment in the factory left psychological scares that never truly healed. During Charles's final Christmas, just a few months before his death, Dickens used the address of the factory in a party memory game.

Perhaps because of these unpleasant childhood experiences Dickens never felt entirely free. Even as a rich man he continued to work, against the medical advice and the advice of friends, because he believed he needed the money. Not unlike Scrooge, Dickens felt an unending need to be free of financial worries; but after the sort of deprived childhood experienced by Dickens (and indeed by Scrooge) that sort of freedom is hard to believe in.  

Scrooge is trapped in an isolated and lonely existence. According to the narrator, Scrooge is as solitary as an oyster . He resides in a suite of rooms that seem to have had their own life of entrapment: He lived in chambers which had once belonged to his deceased partner. They were a gloomy suite of rooms, in a lowering pile of building up a yard, where it had so little business to be, that one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was a young house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses, and forgotten the way out again. Even Scrooge's final resting place is a kind of prison : A churchyard. Here, then, the wretched man whose name he had now to learn, lay underneath the ground. It was a worthy place. Walled in by houses; overrun by grass and weeds, the growth of vegetation's death, not life; choked up with too much burying; fat with repleted appetite. A worthy place! Scrooge not only lives in his own prison, he also puts others in a prison 'cell' at his work: The door of Scrooge's counting-house was open that he might keep his eye upon his clerk, who in a dismal little cell beyond, a sort of tank, was copying letters.

The most famous image in A Christmas Carol of entrapment is the chains of Jacob Marley:

"You are fettered," said Scrooge, trembling. "Tell me why?"

"I wear the chain I forged in life," replied the Ghost. "I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?"

Scrooge trembled more and more.

"Or would you know," pursued the Ghost, "the weight and length of the strong coil you bear yourself? It was full as heavy and as long as this, seven Christmas Eves ago. You have laboured on it, since. It is a ponderous chain!"

Scrooge glanced about him on the floor, in the expectation of finding himself surrounded by some fifty or sixty fathoms of iron cable.

The chains though have a social message and are not just there for the sake of gothic horror:

"Oh! captive, bound, and double-ironed," cried the phantom, "not to know, that ages of incessant labour, by immortal creatures, for this earth must pass into eternity before the good of which it is susceptible is all developed. Not to know that any Christian spirit working kindly in its little sphere, whatever it may be, will find its mortal life too short for its vast means of usefulness. Not to know that no space of regret can make amends for one life's opportunity misused! Yet such was I! Oh! such was I!"

Other phantoms are also fettered like Marley:

The air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went. Every one of them wore chains like Marley's Ghost; some few (they might be guilty governments) were linked together; none were free. Many had been personally known to Scrooge in their lives. He had been quite familiar with one old ghost, in a white waistcoat, with a monstrous iron safe attached to its ankle, who cried piteously at being unable to assist a wretched woman with an infant, whom it saw below, upon a door-step. The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power for ever.

         In a frightening image, rarely introduced in any film or theatrical version of the story, Dickens depicts Jacob Marley enclosed in his own 'infernal atmosphere' : There was something very awful, too, in the spectre's being provided with an infernal atmosphere of its own. Scrooge could not feel it himself, but this was clearly the case; for though the Ghost sat perfectly motionless, its hair, and skirts, and tassels, were still agitated as by the hot vapour from an oven.

But Dickens often works in counter-point and antithesis. The images of entrapment in the story are counter balanced by images of freedom, especially the presence and appearance of the Ghost of Christmas Present: "I am the Ghost of Christmas Present," said the Spirit. "Look upon me." Scrooge reverently did so. It was clothed in one simple green robe, or mantle, bordered with white fur. This garment hung so loosely on the figure, that its capacious breast was bare, as if disdaining to be warded or concealed by any artifice. Its feet, observable beneath the ample folds of the garment, were also bare; and on its head it wore no other covering than a holly wreath, set here and there with shining icicles. Its dark brown curls were long and free; free as its genial face, its sparkling eye, its open hand, its cheery voice, its unconstrained demeanour, and its joyful air. 'Loose', 'free', 'disdaining to be warded or concealed', 'ample folds', 'open hand', 'unconstrained' -- all words and phrases suggesting freedom from any confinement.

In the end Scrooge does become free. And Death's hand proves not to be a strong as Scrooge's will to live: In his agony, he caught the spectral hand. It sought to free itself, but he was strong in his entreaty, and detained it. The Spirit, stronger yet, repulsed him. Holding up his hands in a last prayer to have his fate aye reversed, he saw an alteration in the Phantom's hood and dress. It shrunk, collapsed, and dwindled down into a bedpost.