![]() ![]() ![]() In A Christmas Carol, memory is used by the Ghost of Christmas Past to evoke the tenderness and poignancy which, through recollections both joyful and sorrowful, the soil is tilled in Scrooge’s hardened and dry old heart to find new life and growth. ![]() Though I’ll have a more complete essay on this theme for a particular novel next year, I wanted to start the conversation now, as this theme will appear again and again in different forms from Nicholas Nickleby to The Old Curiosity Shop (especially in Little Nell’s regret at the unvisited graves), to David Copperfield, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and A Tale of Two Cities. Memory connects us, Dickens seems to suggest, not only to the present and the future, but even to a future beyond the grave. (“Recall it.” “Recalled to life.”) Memory is such a charged and poignant theme in Dickens-memory of the past for good or ill, memory of the living and the dead. ![]() How often have we read these words during our journey so far? They will keep coming around again, like a haunting refrain. Memory, remembrance, recollection, recall. “To remember happiness which cannot be restored, is pain, but of a softened kind…and memory, however sad, is the best and purest link between this world and a better.” ![]()
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