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Passage Illustrated: The Name "Ebenezer" inscribed on the Tomb

The Spirit stood among the graves, and pointed down to One. He advanced towards it trembling. The Phantom was exactly as it had been, but he dreaded that he saw new meaning in its solemn shape.

"Before I draw nearer to that stone to which you point," said Scrooge, "answer me one question. Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only?"

Still the Ghost pointed downward to the grave by which it stood.

"Men's courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead," said Scrooge. "But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me."

The Spirit was immovable as ever.

Scrooge crept towards it, trembling as he went; and following the finger, read upon the stone of the neglected grave his own name, EBENEZER SCROOGE.

"Am I that man who lay upon the bed?" he cried, upon his knees.

The finger pointed from the grave to him, and back again.

"No, Spirit! Oh no, no!"

The finger still was there.

"Spirit!" he cried, tight clutching at its robe, "hear me. I am not the man I was. I will not be the man I must have been but for this intercourse. Why show me this, if I am past all hope?"

For the first time the hand appeared to shake.

"Good Spirit," he pursued, as down upon the ground he fell before it: "Your nature intercedes for me, and pities me. Assure me that I yet may change these shadows you have shown me, by an altered life."

The kind hand trembled. ["Stave Four: The Last of the Spirits," pp. 149-151]

Commentary

Scrooge's social reintegration has now begun; his spiritual reclamation is complete once he has gained spiritual and social insight from the periphrastically-named "Last of the Spirits."

The Phantom slowly, gravely, silently, approached. . . . . The phantom spread its dark robe before him for a moment, like a wing. . . . [Stave Four, pages 121 and 139]

But just who is this "last" Spirit whose skeletal finger points inexorably down, towards the grave-marker in the City cemetery in Leech's celebrated confrontation between Ebenezer Scrooge and his own mortality? Shrouded in black cloth suggestive of deep mourning (and the veil of years separating the present from the future), both face and figure of the "phantom" are indiscernible, but Leech, undoubtedly following Dickens's instructions to make this last, most terrifying character indistinct, renders the pointing finger prominently by its central position. Generations of readers have plausibly assumed that the finger is that of the future, of Scrooge's personal destiny, indicating firmly the miser's future state. But, being mortal, of course Scrooge will die, Scrooge the human being, the moneylender, businessman, curmudgeon, skinflint, heart-hardened adult once a lonely, deserted child — the literary character, on the other hand, has enjoyed some hundred and seventy years of immortality, thanks in part to each successive generation's reinterpretation of the inveterate miser. Suppose instead, following the logic of a narrative, we, the readers, identify with the subject of the ghostly visitations and, through our imaginations, undergo what Scrooge undergoes. Is it not plausible, then, that the finger points for us, too, as the church-bell tolls for John Donne in "Meditation 17"? "Never ask for whom the bell tolls: it tolls for thee." In our mortality as in our less gracious attributes, we are all Ebenezer Scrooge. And this, I think, is Leech's point. Whereas the other Spirits make plain through utterance their personal connection to the protagonist — "Long past?". . . "No. Your past" (Stave Two, p. 45) — this gloomy, mute entity makes no such articulate assurance: this is the future to which in the text and in illustrations by Leech, Eytinge, and Furniss we must all come:

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!

In the 1840s, with the imminent threat of typhus and cholera everywhere in the metropolis, the closing of this final spiritual visitation would have been particularly telling for Dickens's comfortable, middle-class readers. In the original 1843 text the reader encounters this passage (verso) as he or she studies the coloured illustration (recto), the dominant colours of which are as somber and the poses of the repentant miser and implacable Spirit are static and yet emotionally moving. The last of the four hand-painted illustrations, this steel-engraving lacks the brightness of the frontispiece, The Fezziwig Ball, Marley's Ghost, and Scrooge's Third Visitor", all three of which feature illuminated interiors and action: the dancing couple in the jolly byegone days of the Regency, the young lovers under mistletoe, the bespectacled fiddler; the advancing ghost and Scrooge warming his hands ineffectually before the fitful fire; the jolly giant holding aloft his torch in his right hand and gesturing towards Scrooge with open palm. Here we leave the fully constructed environments of human habitation for a zone in which nature, exemplified by rank vegetation and a skeletal tree (left), and the works of man (the area railing, the grave, the tomb, the church and tenements in the backdrop) coexist. Again, as in Leech's picture of Christmas Present, the dominant figure is the Spirit to the left; to the right, dwarfed by this memento mori is a prostrate, diminutive Scrooge, no longer in his protective nightcap, but bald, vulnerable, pathetic. After this tableau of an inexorable fate and a shattered mortal, no longer the cocky capitalist mouthing Malthusian sentiments, the dialogue that is really monologue continues, as we read through the illustration and into the text:

"Am I that man who lay upon the bed?" he cried, upon his knees.

The finger pointed from the grave to him, and back again.

"No, Spirit! Oh no, no!"

The finger still was there.

"Spirit!" he cried, tight clutching at its robe, "hear me. I am not the man I was. I will not be the man I must have been but for this intercourse. Why show me this, if I am past all hope?"

For the first time the hand appeared to shake.

"Good Spirit," he pursued, as down upon the ground he fell before it: "Your nature intercedes for me, and pities me. Assure me that I yet may change these shadows you have shown me, by an altered life."

The kind hand trembled. [emphasis added: Stave Four: "The Last of the Spirits," pp. 150-151]

The answer to Scrooge's rhetorical question is "yes and no," for he certainly was the subject of the discussions at the Exchange and at the rag-and-bone dealer's, but for the thoughtful reader (the original reader much aware of his own mortality at the Christmas of 1843) the answer must surely be "no," for that mortal, dying unfriended and alone and cursorily dismissed by the surviving members of the species, is the reader himself. The skeletal hand is specifically — enigmatically, surprisingly in terms of Dickens's diction —"kind," a gentle reminder to every reader then and since that mortality is an essential and necessary part of the human condition as Nature nudges one generation out to make room for the next.

Compare Leech's original, moving by its pose and the juxtaposition of the churchyard and the figures, to those of Sol Eytinge, Jr. (1868) and Fred Barnard (1878). In Eytinge's In the Churchyard the illustrator has moved in for the close up, positioning a petitioning Scrooge at the very feet of the relentless pointer. A mist seems to shroud both figures as the faceless entity above the gnarled and wizened miser proclaims mutely the inevitability of his fate; but already, on the facing page, Scrooge has discovered the possible hope of free will:

"Men's courses will foreshadow certain ends to which, if persevered in, they must lead," said Scrooge. "But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with that you show me!" [Stave Four, p. 101]

Over the page, the Spirit's "kind hand" trembles, as if considering the merits of the petitioner's case, and wavering in its stern judgment. Readers of the 1868 volume, lavishly illustrated (albeit, without the benefit of colourized etchings) would undoubtedly have compared Eytinge's revision with Leech's original, for we may assume that copies had made their way into lending libraries across the Atlantic. The subject of Leech's "The Last of the Spirits," a grim reminder of human mortality set in a London churchyard in the depth of winter (as signalled by the leafless, blackened tree overhanging the black-shrouded Phantom) had already been in circulation via American pirated editions for a quarter of a century. Whereas, in Leech, Scrooge hides his head in remorse (and, perhaps, self-pity), in Eytinge's less emblematic and more realistic "In The Churchyard" Scrooge grabs at the Spirit's draperies, begging for mercy as the figure relentlessly points downward, as in Leech's steel engraving, at the grave marker displaying the name "Ebenezer Scrooge," albeit less clearly lettered than in Leech's. Perhaps owing to the exigencies of the wood-engraving medium, Eytinge's 1868 version — for surely he was influenced by Leech's composition as well as Dickens's text — seems a pallid imitation singularly lacking in detail, providing only weeds and an area railing, and a less obscure, more skeletal form for "The Spirit of Christmas Yet To Come." Leech has placed the grave at the very centre of his composition, moving the figures towards the right and left margins, highlighting the grave marker, and sketching in the urban background more effectively. Finally, in Leech's plate Scrooge has apparently just read the stone's inscription and "on his knees" cries, "Am I the man who lay upon the bed?", whereas we seem to be seeing the same scene moments later in Eytinge's:

"Spirit!" he cried, tight clutching at its robe, "hear me! I am not the man I was. I will not be the man I must have been but for this intercourse. Why show me this, if I am past all hope?"

For the first time the hand appeared to shake. [Stave 4, "The Last of the Spirits"]

The particularity with which Leech has realised the scene implies that he used a definite locale as the basis for his highly atmospheric his setting; according to Gwen Major (1932) the graveyard he had in mind was that of All Hallows Staining, Star Alley, off Mark Lane, in London's Langborn Ward. Eytinge's treatment of his backdrop is so general that it suggests no particular locale, but then Eytinge had no such intimate knowledge of the geographical setting of the novella. See "Scrooge's Chambers," in the Dickensian, Winter 1932-33, in which Major also locates Scrooge's office as being in St. Michael's Alley, which appropriately was in the vicinity of the London Exchange.

The later illustrators in the Anglo-American Household Edition of the 1870s, E. A. Abbey and Fred Barnard, perhaps wishing to avoid comparison with Leech's work, focus on very different scenes in the final; stage of Scrooge's epiphany. Barnard instead examines on the scene in the 'Change when Scrooge's fellow-capitalists joke about his death and the one in which the undertaker's man, the laundrywoman, and Mrs. Dilber approach Old Joe at the marine store shop with their plunder from Scrooge's chamber. More hopefully, Abbey depicts Fred's welcoming his wayward uncle, a changed man, into his home on Christmas Day, a half-page wood-engraving facing the very last page of text, and therefore inducing in the reader a more optimistic and seasonal response than Barnard's ironic, anti-mercantilist visual commentaries on the fate of the investor who once believed it was enough to be "a good man of business," rather than "a good man whose business is mankind."

The Harry Furniss illustration, the final in his series of eight for the Carol in the Charles Dickens Library Edition of 1910 (arguably the last Victorian treatment of the novella), is both an homage to Leech and a more modern reworking of the Victorian original. This india-ink and wash drawing transformed into a lithograph again shows the pervasive influence of John Leech's original series of illustrations for the novella, for Furniss has borrowed even the title and all the essential ingredients of the 1843 steel engraving.

This vigorous india-ink and wash drawing transformed into a lithograph again shows the pervasive influence of John Leech's original series of illustrations for the novella, for Furniss has borrowed even the title. For Furniss, the illustration marks the end of Scrooge's dream and the beginning of his social reintegration as he determines to erase the writing from the stone by henceforth leading "an altered life" (70) and engaging with humanity rather than alienating himself from it. The insistent finger of The Spirit of Christmas Yet To Come (simply designated "The Phantom" by the narrator), the finger of Fate, dominates the entire composition from its central position. Furniss's version is more dynamic and impressionistic than Leech's original, as he sharply delineates only the foreground and the figures. Reversing the positions of the two figures, Furniss maintains their postures, but makes the spirit materialise or hover above rather than stand above Scrooge's grave: the skeletal tree has receded in this cinematic closeup.

The elements of the picture, despite Furniss's distinctive and impressionistic touches, will be familiar to most readers: the grave-marker bearing Scrooge's name (left of centre), with a gravestone and the corner of a monument in the foreground, and the London churchyard's area railing in the upper right; and, of course, the anguished Scrooge, kneeling above his own grave (left) and the implacable spirit, shrouded and unknowable, in the right-hand register. Eytinge's "In the Churchyard" is also clearly derivative, but lacks the drama and dynamic energy of Furniss's and the effective detailing of Leech's. The unfinished look of the illustration, with the multiple lines at the bottom of the Spirit's shroud, for example, and the staccato treatment of the background, with the merest suggestion of a denuded tree (upper left) is highly appropriate to the tentative nature of this Spirit's projections of Scrooge's future, for these events may indeed be altered by his actions in the present. The overall effect here is dark and dismal, but the light plays on Scrooge's bald head and grave, highlighting his capacity for making an intellectual and spiritual change in his motivations and behaviours.

Although there is no equivalent illustration in the Household Edition sequences of E. A. Abbey (1876) and Fred Barnard (1878), surprisingly (given his tendency to avoid unpleasant subjects in this picture-book intended for a child audience) the last great 19th c. visual interpreter of the novella, Arthur Rackham, has provided a wood-engraved headpiece for the fourth stave in which the mute spirit, his swirling shroud agitated by the winds of destiny, compels his mortal companion to read the tombstone (left), on which are inscribed not merely Scrooge's name, but the bare data of his life — the cold, enscribed facts that Scrooge as a Utilitarian man of commerce and trade has so valued above the spirit of the words. With a view to revealing the underlying psychology of the scene, Rackham and Furniss have both adopted the strategy of turning the dread figure away from the viewer, so that he or she must construct the face under the hood, whereas Leech completely enshrouds the visage of this future spirit, suggesting the deep mourning that one encounters in such Dickens novels as Oliver Twist and Great Expectations. Again, the illustrators remind us that the dread figure of Death, a reaper conspicuously without a sickle or scythe, marks each of us for his own.

At last Scrooge comes to the stone that is his, if not the church's, foundation. . . . inscribed on it is his Christian name, "Ebenezer" — but that does not make this a stone of help — and his last name, "Scrooge." Not Marley now. He has de-incorporated in many ways, and become entirely and only his own self. That "own" does not include his counting-house, now inhabited by others sporting a different sign outside, nor his chambers, denuded of what once were his contents. Nor his body, buried. Nothing material can be "owned" permanently. [Patten, 111]

Related Illustrations from Other Editions (1868 to 1915)

Left: Sol Eytinge, Jr.'s In the Churchyard (1868); centre: Harry Furniss's's The Last of the Spirits (1910); right: Arthur Rackham's Heading to Stave Four (1915). [Click on images to enlarge them.]

Bibliography

Dickens, Charles. Christmas Books. Illustrated by Fred Barnard. The Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1878.

Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol in Prose: being a Ghost Story of Christmas. Illustrated by John Leech. London: Chapman & Hall, 1843.

Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol in Prose: being a Ghost Story of Christmas. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1868.

Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol. Illustrated by Arthur Rackham. London: William Heinemann, 1915.

Dickens, Charles. Christmas Stories. Illustrated by E. A. Abbey. The Household Edition. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1876.

Hearne, Michael Patrick, ed. The Annotated Christmas Carol. New York: Avenel, 1989.

Patten, Robert L. Chapter 6, "Marley Was Dead." Dickens, Death, and Christmas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. 74-126.

Thomas, Deborah A. Chapter 4, "The Chord of the Christmas Season." Dickens and The Short Story. Philadelphia: U. Pennsylvania Press, 1982, 62-93.

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Created 21 November 2014

Last modified 18 May 2024