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| "'You speak to me of what is lying here,' The Phantom interposed, & pointed with a finger at the boy" (illustration by F. Bernard for "The Haunted Man") | |
Charles Dickens' "The Haunted Man & the Ghost's Bargain"
commentary by rbadac
Charles Dickens is the ruler of Christmas stories & wrote more chestnuts of that description than will be roasted on this open fire. I'm only going to heat up one of them for you: "The Haunted Man & The Ghost's Bargain."
Or, as I fondly termed it while reading, "the other long one." In my paperback of Peter Haining's The Complete Ghost Stories of Charles Dickens (Washington Square Press, 1983; the hardcover was Michael Joseph, 1982), "A Christmas Carol" takes up 75 pages; "Haunted Man" claims 88, & I don't mind telling you it was rough going there at first, what with my rotten attention span & the fulsome prose of that other era, but you will find it well worth the trouble, & will fall prey to the heartwarming Dickens mojo just in time for Christmas, & have an extra nimbus around your head with everyone else watching Alastair Sim on TV.
"Haunted Man" is scarier. Instead of a crotchety & deserving old Scrooge being run through the attitude adjustment mill, we have a relatively innocent victim granted a terrible power. Redlaw the chemist is not a bad man at all; he's just a little impulsive when he reflects back on his life & surmises too quickly & unwisely that he could have done without all the unhappy parts of it. It's an easy mistake to make. But he'll settle, with some prodding from a baleful Phantom replica of himself, for the loss of all memory of "sorrow, wrong, & trouble."
Unfortunately, "The Monkey's Paw" had not been written yet, so Redlaw has no inkling of the perilousness of this agreement. Then too, he is also plagued with a trick condition that stipulates he pass this callous nepenthe onto whomever he comes into contact with, supposedly so he can share his newfound "improvement" with the rest of the world.
And now the charade of Redlaw's supposed blessing comes apart with a hideous precipitation, as we see everyone around him succumb to his curse of forgetfulness. It's not as pat a moral message as it would seem, though it plays havoc with the good people of a Dickensian universe. There's a little something extra for our benefit, which I'll come to presently.
Dickens' characters, as always, are lovingly drawn, & carry the narrative with their intensely realized identities: Redlaw's butler, William Swidger ("Mr William"), who drives you mad until the Dickens magic touches you & makes you realize that he is only a simple good-hearted soul after all, & as such deserves to be not only tolerated but admired; his sweet wife Milly ("Mrs William"), the very essence of kindness & patience; William's old father Philip, whose hilarious presence ("I'm eighty-seven !") is a veneer for even deeper wisdom; the Cratchit-like Tetterby family, which is delineated with breathtaking warmth & perception, particularly little Johnny, who bears his tyrannical baby sister (called "Moloch" by Dickens) on his back with all the self-sacrificing grace of Tiny Tim with his crutch, but with more humor & less cloying pathos; & the nameless feral beggar child that reluctantly becomes bound to Redlaw in his misery, the only one immune to his soul-destroying Midas touch simply because he has no soul to destroy.
This being Dickens and a story from 1848 and a Christmas story, it is foregone that all will end well-- it's hardly a spoiler to tell you that. But don't let that ruin your holiday. I said earlier that "The Haunted Man" was scarier, & I wasn't kidding. The thing about reading this tale today is that, had this story been a contemporary one written in the last decade of the 20th century, it would never have passed for fiction. You'll see what I mean when you observe how the people who are touched by the blighted Redlaw are transformed from the kind, thoughtful human beings that represent what Dickens saw as the best in mankind into -- the way people are now. So accurate is the likeness that you may at first wonder what the fuss is about, or if anything happened at all, until you remember that you are not in the modern world, you're in a story written 150 years ago, & these seemingly "normal" individuals, here, are monsters & travesties. You will see, & you will shudder.
-rbadac, the Ghost of Christmas Lost