The Ghostly Artz of Christmas Past

Charles Dickens wrote a novella titled A Christmas Carol and on December 17, 1843 

                                                                  First Edition, 1843

it was published by Chapman & Hall. It is the story of a bitter old miser who endures 4 haunting in the course of one Christmas Eve and how what he sees changes him.  The story was an instant success and has never been out of print.

                                                                              Charles Dickens  1867 - 1868

A Christmas Carol takes you on a journey where you will experience every emotion through images. Images of darkness, sadness, coldness, despair, and death but, it will also lift your spirit with images of joy, light, warmth and life. Just as winter mellows into spring, Scrooge, the miser who is the embodiment of winter mellows into a gentle old man filled with goodwill.

                                                           Scrooge and Bob Cratchit

                                                             woodcut by John Leech

The second haunting Scrooge endures on that Christmas Eve is that of The Ghost of Christmas Past.  In an effort to get Scrooge to repent of his cruel, miserly ways the ghost reveals to him scenes from his Christmases past. This is how we, the observers learn what the young Scrooge endured that made him into the man he is and why he dislikes Christmas. 

                                                                         Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Past.

                                                                          Original 1843 illustration by John Leech 

Here is how Dickens describes the ghost…”being now a thing with one arm, now with one leg, now with twenty legs, now a pair of legs without a head, now a head without a body: of which dissolving parts, no outline would be visible in the dense gloom wherein they melted away."

This week we present The Ghostly Artz of Christmas Past.