88 pages • 2 hours read
Charles DickensA Christmas Carol
Fiction | Novella | Middle Grade | Published in 1843A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapter 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “Stave III: The Second of the Three Spirits”
No sooner does Scrooge fall asleep after escaping the first spirit than he hears the bell once again chiming one o’clock with no intervening day. Scrooge goes to investigate a light from the adjacent room. A voice calls him into the room, which is decorated for Christmas. At the center, a figure dressed as Father Christmas and sitting on a throne of food introduces himself as the Ghost of Christmas Present.
Scrooge is more meekly subservient with this visitant. He takes hold of the spirit’s robe and finds himself on the crowded street on Christmas morning. The shops are full of food. Children run and play. People of the poorer classes don’t have adequate cooking facilities, so they carry their dinners to the bakeries, where their food is cooked. Wherever tempers flare up and people seem about to quarrel, the ghost sprinkles something from his torch over them and restores peace. He sprinkles their holiday meals as well, and Scrooge asks what the spirit is adding. The ghost says that it is the Christmas spirit. It makes everything taste more satisfying on this day, and it is especially needed by these poor folk who have so little.
The ghost then brings Scrooge to the home of Bob Cratchit. The Cratchit family are decked out in their best attire, which for the girls means ribbons; the oldest son, Peter, is proud and self-important in his father’s best collar. Their oldest daughter, Martha, returns from her job as a hatmaker’s apprentice. Finally, Bob returns from church with their youngest child, Tiny Tim, who is thin and frail and walks with a crutch. Bob tells his wife how good and sweet-natured Tim was at church and repeats a remark of Tiny Tim’s to the effect that he hopes seeing him will give people pleasure by reminding them of Jesus, who healed the sick. When questioned, the ghost informs Scrooge that if nothing happens to change the future, Tiny Tim will die within the year. At the end of the meal, Bob Cratchit offers a toast to Scrooge, who, by paying Bob’s salary, keeps food on their table and a roof over their head. Mrs. Cratchit isn’t so generous; she would like to give Scrooge a “piece of [her] mind” (41).
The ghost then walks through the city with Scrooge, watching people rushing back and forth from parties, celebrations, and dinners with friends and loved ones. Then he escorts Scrooge through a sequence of other Christmas scenes, all joyful despite the generally meager circumstances—two men alone in a lighthouse, sailors far out at sea, a miner’s family somewhere in Cornwall—until they come to Fred’s house. Fred is telling his (apparently pregnant) wife and her sisters that he feels sorry for Scrooge, whose miserly, cold nature deprives him of happiness and harms only himself. His wife, like Bob Cratchit’s, is scornful. After dinner, the group plays a number of games, and then Fred’s wife plays the harp. Scrooge recognizes the melody as one his little sister loved. Everything the ghost has shown him comes back to him, and he thinks that if he had been able to listen to that song throughout the years, he might have led a different life.
The group plays more games, and Scrooge joins in, although they cannot see or hear him. The ghost finally pulls him away and they travel the world, seeing Christmas celebrated in numerous ways. As they travel, the ghost ages, and he reveals that he will die at midnight.
As the time comes for them to part, Scrooge notices a hand like a claw emerging from the robe of the ghost. The ghost pulls his robe aside, revealing two children, a boy and a girl—emaciated, sickly, and vicious. Scrooge asks the ghost if they are his children, and the ghost says that they are the children of humanity. They cling to Christmas for the vestige of hope and comfort it gives them. The ghost tells Scrooge that they are named Ignorance and Want and that they will be humanity’s end. When Scrooge asks if there is any recourse, the ghost quotes Scrooge’s earlier remark about prisons and workhouses. Midnight approaches, and the Ghost of Christmas Past disappears as the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come approaches.
Chapter 3 Analysis
Stave 3 is the longest chapter of the book and focuses on the present, as it is the present that Dickens is primarily concerned with. He seeks to expose the immediate problems of the poor to elicit sympathy and respect for them. One of the obstacles to providing adequate assistance to the Victorian lower classes was the common belief that they were lazy and prone to all sorts of sin and vice. Dickens wanted to show that this was not the case.
Scrooge crosses another threshold when he steps through the door from his bedroom into his living room. This time, he doesn’t require coercion. He takes the step voluntarily and submits himself to the will of the spirit. Memory has awakened old feelings in him. He has the sense that he needs something, but he doesn’t yet know what it is or how to get it. That is what the Ghost of Christmas Present will show him.
The street scene to which the spirit first takes him is rich with sensory detail—sights, sounds, and smells. The focus of the scene is primarily on food and its pleasures. The food is depicted as actively seducing shoppers, winking and flirting seductively: “Spanish onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish Friars, and winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by” (35). Everything is pregnant with meaning. Nuts, for example, are not just nuts but “piles of filberts, mossy and brown, recalling, in their fragrance, ancient walks among the woods” (35). The effect is to link food with abundance, nurturing, and love of a very basic and physical kind. This reflects the holiday’s pagan origins. 200 years earlier, the Puritans under Oliver Cromwell tried to stamp out the non-Christian elements of the midwinter festival—including anything having to do with the body and the senses—but the Victorians rediscovered the joys of exactly that kind of celebration in the darkest days of the year. The warm physicality of the scene also contrasts strongly with Scrooge’s cold self-denial, though unlike the Puritans, he shuns material pleasures not because he views them as sinful but because he considers them wasted money.
The Cratchit family meal—another scene revolving around food—is the centerpiece of Stave 3 and the longest unified scene in the book. Like the scene of Belle’s family, it shows Scrooge what he has denied himself through his fixation on money. This time, rather than showing him the family he could have had, it shows him the father—i.e., the man—he could have been.
Apart from Scrooge, Tiny Tim is the most famous character in the book. Like Fan, Tiny Tim is a version of the child savior archetype who intercedes on behalf of the unhappy to reconnect them with the world; Tiny Tim’s remark about inspiring people to think of Jesus explicitly associates him with the Christian savior. Readers sometimes find the scene to be saccharine, but Tiny Tim’s thought is a sad one. It suggests that Tiny Tim dreams of being well and tries to console himself that he has some positive impact on the world despite his frailty.
Fred embodies another very physical human need: laughter. Games and play characterize the party at Fred’s house. Fred is not in need of food or shelter, so the focus of the scene is on the higher but still essential need for intimacy and play. Scrooge is so transported by the fun that he is willing to join in even the jokes at his expense.
The final scene of this section, the appearance of Ignorance and Want, recalls Scrooge’s remark in Stave 1 that he does not know that the workhouses are miserable and degrading or that some people would rather die than go there. In other words, he is not just ignorant (in fact, ignorant of want); he chooses to be ignorant, and that choice is ultimately “doom.” The ghost does not specify what that doom consists of, but it is likely both personal and societal. For the individual, ignoring the needs of one’s fellow humans degrades one’s character and ultimately invites judgment (including divine retribution of the kind Marley is now enduring). For society, the danger is more immediate and material: Ignoring poverty and suffering makes violent uprising all but inevitable (an idea Dickens would explore further in his 1859 novel, A Tale of Two Cities).
Time is growing more distorted by the end of this chapter. Initially, Marley told Scrooge that the spirits would come at one o’clock on three successive nights. That statement is already contradicted by the fact that the Ghost of Christmas Past appeared one hour before Scrooge went to bed. Then the Ghost of Christmas Present appeared at one o’clock but with no intervening day between. The life of the ghost of Christmas Present, however, ends at midnight, and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come appears immediately afterward, apparently disregarding the intervening hour.
Related Titles
By Charles Dickens
