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Ghost of Christmas Present
The Ghost of Christmas Present is a fictional character in Charles Dickens' 1843 novella A Christmas Carol. The Ghost is one of three spirits that appear to miser Ebenezer Scrooge to offer him a chance of redemption.
Following a visit from the ghost of his deceased business partner, Jacob Marley, Scrooge receives nocturnal visits from three Ghosts of Christmas, each representing a different period in Scrooge's life. The Ghost of Christmas Present is concerned with Scrooge's current life and the present Christmas Day.
The Ghost of Christmas Present is presented as a personification of the Christmas spirit, and in the novella's first edition hand-coloured drawing by John Leech resembles early-Victorian images of Father Christmas. The spirit first appears to Scrooge on a throne made of traditional Christmas foodstuffs that would have been familiar to Dickens's more prosperous readers.
The spirit becomes the mouthpiece for Dickens's view on social reform and Christian charity: generosity and goodwill to all men – especially to the poor – and celebration of Christmas Day.
By early 1843 Dickens had been affected by the treatment of the poor and, in particular, the treatment of the children of the poor after witnessing children working in appalling conditions in a tin mine and following a visit to a ragged school. Indeed, Dickens experienced poverty as a boy when he was forced to work in a blacking factory after his father's imprisonment for debt. Originally intending to write a political pamphlet titled, An Appeal to the People of England, on behalf of the Poor Man's Child, he changed his mind and instead wrote A Christmas Carol which voiced his social concerns about poverty and injustice.
Dickens's friend and biographer John Forster said that Dickens had 'a hankering after ghosts', while not actually having a belief in them himself, and his journals Household Words and All the Year Round regularly featured ghost stories, with the novelist publishing an annual ghost story for some years after his first, A Christmas Carol, in 1843. In this novella, Dickens was innovative in making the existence of the supernatural a natural extension of the real world in which Scrooge and his contemporaries lived. Dickens making the Christmas Spirits a central feature of his story is a reflection of the early-Victorian interest in the paranormal.
The Ghost of Christmas Present is described as "a jolly Giant", and Leech's hand-coloured illustration of the friendly and cheerful Spirit, his hand open in a gesture of welcome confronted by the amazed Scrooge has been described by Jane Rabb Cohen as elegantly combining "the ideal, real, and supernatural" with humour and sympathy. It is clear that the Spirit is based on Father Christmas, the ancient patriarchal figure associated with the English Christmas holiday, traditionally a bearded pagan giant depicted in a fur-lined evergreen robe wearing a crown of holly while holding mistletoe. Father Christmas, or Old Christmas, was often represented as surrounded by plentiful food and drink and started to appear regularly in illustrated magazines of the 1840s.
The American Santa Claus commemorated in the 1822 poem A Visit from St. Nicholas (better known as The Night Before Christmas) by Clement Clarke Moore is derived from his pagan English counterpart and the gift-giving Saint Nicholas of Myra, but the Ghost of Christmas Present should not be confused with the American version, who was little known in England before the early 1850s.
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Ghost of Christmas Present
The Ghost of Christmas Present is a fictional character in Charles Dickens' 1843 novella A Christmas Carol. The Ghost is one of three spirits that appear to miser Ebenezer Scrooge to offer him a chance of redemption.
Following a visit from the ghost of his deceased business partner, Jacob Marley, Scrooge receives nocturnal visits from three Ghosts of Christmas, each representing a different period in Scrooge's life. The Ghost of Christmas Present is concerned with Scrooge's current life and the present Christmas Day.
The Ghost of Christmas Present is presented as a personification of the Christmas spirit, and in the novella's first edition hand-coloured drawing by John Leech resembles early-Victorian images of Father Christmas. The spirit first appears to Scrooge on a throne made of traditional Christmas foodstuffs that would have been familiar to Dickens's more prosperous readers.
The spirit becomes the mouthpiece for Dickens's view on social reform and Christian charity: generosity and goodwill to all men – especially to the poor – and celebration of Christmas Day.
By early 1843 Dickens had been affected by the treatment of the poor and, in particular, the treatment of the children of the poor after witnessing children working in appalling conditions in a tin mine and following a visit to a ragged school. Indeed, Dickens experienced poverty as a boy when he was forced to work in a blacking factory after his father's imprisonment for debt. Originally intending to write a political pamphlet titled, An Appeal to the People of England, on behalf of the Poor Man's Child, he changed his mind and instead wrote A Christmas Carol which voiced his social concerns about poverty and injustice.
Dickens's friend and biographer John Forster said that Dickens had 'a hankering after ghosts', while not actually having a belief in them himself, and his journals Household Words and All the Year Round regularly featured ghost stories, with the novelist publishing an annual ghost story for some years after his first, A Christmas Carol, in 1843. In this novella, Dickens was innovative in making the existence of the supernatural a natural extension of the real world in which Scrooge and his contemporaries lived. Dickens making the Christmas Spirits a central feature of his story is a reflection of the early-Victorian interest in the paranormal.
The Ghost of Christmas Present is described as "a jolly Giant", and Leech's hand-coloured illustration of the friendly and cheerful Spirit, his hand open in a gesture of welcome confronted by the amazed Scrooge has been described by Jane Rabb Cohen as elegantly combining "the ideal, real, and supernatural" with humour and sympathy. It is clear that the Spirit is based on Father Christmas, the ancient patriarchal figure associated with the English Christmas holiday, traditionally a bearded pagan giant depicted in a fur-lined evergreen robe wearing a crown of holly while holding mistletoe. Father Christmas, or Old Christmas, was often represented as surrounded by plentiful food and drink and started to appear regularly in illustrated magazines of the 1840s.
The American Santa Claus commemorated in the 1822 poem A Visit from St. Nicholas (better known as The Night Before Christmas) by Clement Clarke Moore is derived from his pagan English counterpart and the gift-giving Saint Nicholas of Myra, but the Ghost of Christmas Present should not be confused with the American version, who was little known in England before the early 1850s.