SOURCE: “Christmas at Scrooge's,” in Victorian Fantasy, Indiana University Press, 1979, pp. 38–74.

In the following essay, Prickett delineates the defining characteristics of Victorian literature and regards A Christmas Carol as a prime example of the Christmas book genre.

The ‘internalization’ of fantasy in the early nineteenth century meant, in effect, the evolution of a new language. The worlds of dreams and nightmares, madmen and children were areas of human experience which had hitherto been all too often ignored or even denied. Their recognition helped to open up a new view of the human mind in which conventional distinctions between aesthetics and psychology were blurred by a growing awareness of the unconscious in shaping our mental processes. As we have seen, it is possible to trace something of this evolution by looking at various key figures in the development of late-eighteenth-century sensibility, yet such men as Walpole and Beckford, or...