No need to review this book. It is an icon of western culture. In my family, it was read aloud every year the week before Christmas until I left home.
It was probably the single most formative book in my life.
The most significant piece of the book....in my memory comes
at the end of the 3rd Stave
"The chimes were ringing the three quarters past eleven at the moment.
"Forgive me if I am not justified in what I ask," said Scrooge, looking intently at the Spirit's robe, "but I see something strange, and not belonging to yourself, protruding from your skirts. Is it a foot or a claw?"
"It might be a claw, for the flesh there is upon it," was the Spirit's sorrowful reply. "Look here."
From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children, wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.
"O Man! look here! Look, look, down here!" exclaimed the Ghost.
They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds....
Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.
"Spirit! are they yours?" Scrooge could say no more.
"They are Man's" said the Spirit, looking down upon them. "This boy is IGNORANCE. This girl is WANT. Beware of them both, and all their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.
"Have they no refuge or resource?" Cried Scrooge. "Are there no prisons?" said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. "Are there no workshouses?"
The spirit then disappears and Scrooge is left to the last spirit.
This image of ignorance and want have shaped my belief system. They have made me less ready to blame individuals for their circumstances and ready to look at ways we can all help each other in this life. This scene foreshadows the writing on Scrooges tombstone -- can it be erased?
Dickens resoundingly says yes. It is not too late for Scrooge. It is not too late for humankind-- we can erase that which will lead to our Doom.