SOURCE: “The Ceremony of Innocence: Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol,” in PMLA, Vol. 90, No. 1, 1975, pp. 22–31.

In the following essay, Gilbert considers the “Scrooge problem,” or the issue of the credibility of Scrooge's conversion during the course of A Christmas Carol.

As in their birth, wherein they are not guilty …

Hamlet i.iv

I

It is impossible to get into a serious discussion of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol without sooner or later having to confront “the Scrooge problem.” Edmund Wilson stated that problem succinctly and dramatically in his well-known essay “The Two Scrooges” when he wrote:

Shall we ask what Scrooge would actually be like if we were to follow him beyond the frame of the story? Unquestionably, he would relapse, when the merriment was over—if not while it was still going on—into moroseness, vindictiveness, suspicion. He would, that is to say, reveal himself as the...