What a lesser-known Charles Dickens Christmas story teaches about loss
Spencer Klavan
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In 1848, Charles Dickens’s sister Fanny died of consumption. It was a pitiable end, right out of Dickens’s own novels. Talented and gentle Fanny, bright star of her brother’s youth, would soon be followed into death by her sickly child Henry.
That year, Dickens published his last Christmas novella. Everyone knows his first one: A Christmas Carol set the tone for the holiday ever afterward. Less familiar than Scrooge’s redemption, though, is the later fable of The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain. It’s a story about grief.
Dickens’s imaginary perfect Christmas quickly became the standard image of the season: thick-fallen snow, warmth overflowing from a busy hearth, and the aching sense of a sweetness that will be gone too soon. That sadness of passing time is an indispensable part of the holiday. When little children ask why we can’t have Christmas every day, this is the answer: The melancholy of its ending is part of its loveliness.
Each year of Dickens’s life seemed to bring a richer sadness to offset the merriment of his favorite holiday. In The Haunted Man, he wondered what would be lost if that sorrow simply vanished. His main character, Redlaw, is a renowned chemistry professor tormented by past disappointments and betrayals. In the watches of the night, a phantom offers to erase the memory of his pain.
And why not? “If there were poison in my body, should I not, possessed of antidotes … use them?” asks Redlaw. “If there be poison in my mind … shall I not cast it out?” But poison mixed with blood doesn’t draw out so easily, and loss mixed into a human life is harder still to separate from joy. His suffering forgotten but not gone, Redlaw slowly loses touch with all compassion and delight. Like a patient struggling against anesthesia, he can only grope blindly at his fading connection to humanity.
It’s a cold world, and everybody’s mourning something. This time of year, the beloved are with us by their absence as much as by their presence. Nothing is harder to bear at Christmas than the empty chair at the kitchen table, as Dickens well knew. We could be forgiven for wanting to dull the pain, as Redlaw did.
And the ghost’s bargain is certainly on the table. Not content with administering medication to quiet the voices of grief, some scientists are trying to develop ways of erasing bad memories from the brain altogether. Tempting, tempting.
But a spotless mind is an empty one. Years after The Haunted Man, Dickens wrote an essay called “What Christmas Is As We Grow Older,” about holding on to lost love at the holidays. The young sweetheart that slipped away, the career we never quite achieved, even the children that should be here but aren’t: At Christmas, they join us by way of our longing for them. Painful as that longing is, Dickens would not be parted from it. “Lost friend, lost child, lost parent, sister, brother, husband, wife,” he wrote, “we will not so discard you!”
It’s the whole point of the thing, the reason why we can’t feel Christmas joy without Christmas sorrow. The two are bound together, as the child born in Bethlehem with songs of angels must one day go to the cross. It is what he came for.
On her deathbed, Dickens’s sister Fanny said she was passing into a place where time itself would become a “mere human fancy.” In eternity, she and her family were already reunited — though on earth they must pass through long years without her.
Time is merciless. It brings death to us all. But there is a region beyond time, as much in our memory as in our future, where the departed are raised. Christmas is a sign and a vision of that homeland, which is why, when it comes, we remember the dead and miss them. It hurts because they should be with us. But we celebrate because one day they will.
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Spencer Klavan is an associate editor of the Claremont Review of Books and host of the Young Heretics podcast. His forthcoming book, How to Save the West, is available for preorder now.