A Christmas Carol Week 3

1 hour ago

5 min read

The Gothic and the supernatural in A Christmas Carol

Last session we met Scrooge: cold, mean and alone. In this session, his quiet, ordinary evening turns into a nightmare. You’ll read the second half of Stave 1 and find out how Dickens uses ghosts, darkness and strange sounds to frighten Scrooge and his readers. You’ll also explore the meaning of Marley’s famous chain.

Study book: Starter: ghost stories (page 16, 5 minutes). List four things you would expect to find in a Victorian ghost story. Keep your list, because you’ll need it soon.

Reading Stave 1 (part 2)

Study book: Read Stave 1 (part 2), pages 16–22

Study book: Check your understanding (page 22, 15 minutes).

Thinking about Stave one, watch The Lightup Hub's summary making notes on anything you think is important.

What is the Gothic?

Gothic is a style of story full of fear, mystery and the supernatural. It began in the late 1700s. By Dickens’ time, ghost stories were a favourite way of passing long winter evenings, and telling them around the fire at Christmas was a Victorian tradition. Choosing a ghost story let Dickens hook his readers with something they already loved, as we saw in the Preface.

Typical Gothic features include:

darkness, gloom and fog
old, gloomy buildings
ghosts and the supernatural
strange, unexplained sounds
fear, suspense and mystery
characters who are trapped or punished

Watch TedEd How to Make Your Writing Suspenseful.

How it Links to the Novella

Darkness and gloom - Scrooge lives in rooms that are lonely and dark, and he doesn’t mind at all: “Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it.” Even here, Dickens links the Gothic to Scrooge’s meanness. He sits in the dark to save money.

The face in the knocker - The first supernatural moment is quiet and creepy rather than loud. Scrooge sees “not a knocker, but Marley’s face,” with “a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar.” The simile is strange and slightly funny, but also unpleasant, because it makes us think of rot and decay.

Strange sounds - Dickens uses sound to build fear. First a bell begins to swing, then “every bell in the house” rings. Then comes “a clanking noise, deep down below; as if some person were dragging a heavy chain.” The noise comes closer: “on the floors below; then coming up the stairs; then coming straight towards his door.” The repeated “then” makes the ghost feel unstoppable as it moves closer and closer.

The ghost - Marley’s ghost is truly horrifying. When he takes off the bandage round his head, “its lower jaw dropped down upon its breast!” Scrooge falls to his knees and cries “Mercy!”

Humour and horror - Dickens mixes fear with jokes. Scrooge tells the ghost it might be “an undigested bit of beef” and says “There’s more of gravy than of grave about you”. That’s a pun, a joke based on a word with two meanings or a similar sound. Scrooge is joking to keep his own fear down. Remember the Preface: Dickens wanted his ghost to “haunt their houses pleasantly”. He scares us, but never so much that we stop enjoying the story.

Study book: Gothic hunt (pages 22–23, 20 minutes)

Building Tension

Tension is the feeling that something is about to happen. Dickens builds it by:

Delaying: we hear the ghost long before we see it.
Making the sounds louder step by step: a bell, then all the bells, then chains, then a “booming sound” from the cellar door.
Bringing the danger closer: from the cellar, up the stairs, to the door, then through it.
Using short exclamations when the fear peaks: “Mercy!”

Study book: Tension graph (page 24, 10 minutes)

Marley’s Chain

Study book: The chain (page 23, 15 minutes). Do this task before reading the explanation below. Then add anything you missed in a different colour.

A symbol is an object that stands for an idea. Marley’s chain is “made (for Scrooge observed it closely) of cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel.” Every item is about money and business. The chain symbolises Marley’s greed and his sins.

Marley tells Scrooge: “I wear the chain I forged in life ... I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will”. Every selfish choice he made added another link. Nobody forced the chain on him. He made it himself.

Then comes the terrifying part. Scrooge’s own chain “was full as heavy and as long as this, seven Christmas Eves ago. You have laboured on it, since.” This is foreshadowing, a hint of what is to come. Unless Scrooge changes, he will suffer the same fate as Marley, only worse.

How it Links to Context

Most Victorians were Christians. They believed that how you lived on earth decided what happened to your soul after death. Marley’s spirit is being punished: it is “doomed to wander through the world” with “No rest, no peace. Incessant torture of remorse.” This is his penance, a punishment for doing wrong.

His worst punishment is to see suffering he can no longer do anything about. The phantoms outside Scrooge’s window want “to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power for ever.” Dickens’ message to his readers is clear: help others now, while you still can.

Study book: ‘Mankind was my business’ (page 23, 10 minutes). Again, try this first, then read on.

When Scrooge tells Marley he was always “a good man of business”, Marley cries out: “Business! ... Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”

Marley uses “business” in two ways. The first is his job, making money. The second is his duty, caring for other people. Marley realises too late that his real “business” was caring for others, and that his trade was only “a drop of water” compared to that “ocean”. This also answers Scrooge’s words to the charity collectors in Stave 1: “It’s not my business”.

PEEL Paragraph: Worked Example

Question: How does Dickens show that Scrooge is beginning to change at the end of Stave 1?

Point: By the end of Stave 1, Dickens shows that Marley’s visit has started to shake Scrooge’s certainty.Evidence: When he is alone again, Scrooge “tried to say ‘Humbug!’ but stopped at the first syllable.”Explain: “Humbug” has been Scrooge’s catchphrase, the word he uses to dismiss Christmas and anything he doesn’t believe in. The fact that he cannot finish it suggests that, for the first time, he is no longer sure he is right. Link: This is the first tiny sign of Scrooge’s transformation. Dickens hints to his readers that even the coldest person can begin to change.

Study book: Exam focus (page 24, 25 minutes).

Write two PEEL paragraphs answering:

How does Dickens use the supernatural to create fear in Stave 1?

Choose two different moments, for example the face in the knocker, the sounds, Marley’s appearance or the phantoms. Embed short quotations, and zoom in on key words.