By Nathaniel Saylor

In Stave Four of A Christmas Carol, the Ghost of Christmas Yet-to-Come transports Scrooge to a future time, to a miserable London pawn shop.  There he observes three rascals who have caught one another in the same criminal act: looting a dead man’s body and now trying to sell their loot.  The reader quickly guesses the identity of the dead man; Scrooge staves off the obvious truth.

Continue reading Stave 4 of A Christmas Carol: Death and Resurrection →

By Ron Bergez

In Stave Three of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Bob Cratchit carries Tiny Tim aloft on his shoulders into the Christmas-warm Cratchit household, followed by the Tim’s oft-imitated utterance “God bless us every one!” Stave Three becomes the place where we are relieved for a time from the bleakness of Scrooge’s sad, solitary existence and the fearsome revelations which accompany the visits of the Spirits. But then we are challenged. As the stave ends, Scrooge spies from under the Spirit’s robe a foot so meager that it could be a claw. Beneath the Spirit’s garment are two gaunt and frightened children. They are the boy Ignorance and the girl Want, says the Spirit. Both are the offspring of Man, and the Spirit warns Scrooge to beware particularly the boy Ignorance. “[O]n his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.” The Spirit disappears. Continue reading A Light Beyond Want and Ignorance: Stave 3 of A Christmas Carol →