SOURCE: “Spectacular Sympathy: Visuality and Ideology in Dickens's A Christmas Carol,” in PMLA, Vol. 109, No. 2, March, 1994, pp. 254–65.

In the following essay, Jaffe maintains that A Christmas Carol is “arguably Dickens's most visually evocative text” and explores the circular relationship between spectatorship and ideologies of identity in nineteenth-century England.

In a well-known essay, Sergei Eisenstein describes literature in general and Dickens in particular as cinema's predecessors because of their evocation of visual effects. Literature, Eisenstein writes, provides cinema with “parents and [a] pedigree, … a past”; it is “the art of viewing” (232–33). What Eisenstein construes as aesthetic development, however, may also be regarded as a persistent “regime of perception” in Western culture—one in which appeals to the eye play a significant role in the production and circulation of ideology.¹ An emphasis on visuality, whether literary or cinematic, promotes spectatorship as a dominant cultural activity. But such an emphasis also...