Seasons Greetings to you all!
Since it is Yuletide, I thought I’d take a festive and fun option and present a classic Christmas Time-Travel tale. There are a number of different versions of the story, it has been remade over and over, with animation, actors, cgi, and even Muppets.
Each version has its own unique take on the story, but at their most basic these retellings are all the same: A miserly man, who has a terrible attitude to this time of year, is visited by the ghost of a dead friend who warns him that he must mend his ways, and that he will be visited by three spirits. These spirits bend the laws of time and space to teach the miser to appreciate the season once again.
I’m referring t one of the oldest time-travel stories, A Christmas Carol.
Normally, this is the point where I’d direct you to go and watch the movie but, there are just too many versions to do it justice. Whether it’s TV movies, cinema releases, musical versions or animated… I can practically guarantee that there was one on the other day…
But…Ghosts?
As normal with these Popcorn Paradoxes pieces, we’re going to assume that everything we see in whichever movie you’ve seen is documentation of actual events.
That means we have to accept that Ebeneezer Scrooge (in whichever incarnation you like) is really visited by the ghost of his deceased partner Jacob Marley, or at least that he really believes that.
Marley’s Ghost
The beginning of the story (no matter which version) frames Scrooge as a miserly old businessman, rich and successful in business, but poor and ineffectual socially.
We see him at his work, where he derides his overworked and underpaid employee, his clerk Bob Cratchit (or an analogue), for wanting him to spend money on coals for heating. Scrooge’s nephew, Fred, arrives to invite his uncle to Christmas Dinner and wish him (and Bob and his family) a Merry Christmas. To which Scrooge famously replies, “Bah Humbug!”
Scrooge fails to assist men seeking charitable donations for the poor, beggars and street urchins who sing carols for money. Scrooge is rude and miserly to each in turn.
It is after we have been shown Scrooge is a terrible human being, who takes his dinner alone in a tavern, that we see Scrooge arrive home. It is here, at his own front door that he first sees the face of his old business partner, dead seven years, Jacob Marley. Marley’s face appears upon the door knocker as Scrooge unlocks the door.
The inside of the house again shows Scrooge as a miser, he does not light the lights, or any candles as he enters as “darkness is cheap”. He lives alone in apartments in an under furnished, unheated, but large house. It is as he is eating his gruel that evening that Scrooge sees Marley’s face a second time on the mantlepiece.
Then the ghost of Jacob Marley arrives through the door, insubstantial, partially transparent and bound in chains made from padlocks, ledgers, and cash boxes. This third appearance of Marley warns Scrooge that unless he changes his ways, he will share Marley’s fate. And that other ghosts will visit Scrooge to help him mend his ways.
A vision of an old, dead friend is fairly easily explained as hallucination, of course, but there is no reason the hallucination couldn’t just try to scare Scrooge himself. After all, Ebeneezer is not dismissive of his old friend, but of his message. Instead, we are presented with a collection of other ghosts who will assist in this transformation of Scrooge.
Depending on the version of the story, the ghosts will either appear over the next three nights, or appear over the three hours before midnight on Christmas Eve.
The original was over three nights the first two ghosts appearing at one o’clock, and the third at the final stroke of midnight, but the story is usually simplified (removing one aspect of time travel from the story) by making it happen in one night.
The original story though makes it clear that Scrooge believes that he falls asleep on Christmas morning at about two o’clock. He awakes at midnight the next night, having slept the day away, he believes.
Ghost of Christmas Past
The first of the visiting spirits is described in the novella as a glowing. angelic being, of indeterminate age and gender, with a head that appears to support a candle flame glow, but the films have taken very loose interpretations of this. Young and old actors and actresses have played this this role down the years, but usually a younger woman is cast.
This spirit is the first visitor that demonstrates an ability to manipulate, if not time itself, then certainly Scrooge’s memories.
The spirit takes Scrooge back to his earliest memories of Christmas. Which he observes as a ghost himself, able to pass through the people and objects of the scenes that he sees. The ghost describes the visions as shadows, that are not conscious of their intrusion.
He sees himself spending Christmas at boarding school, he is unwanted at home, and obviously this began his dislike of the season. Time is moved on and he sees his sister Fan, the mother of young Fred, who comes to the school to bring him home for one Christmas.
Later we see the young Scrooge as he enjoyed the Christmas party at his work for his first boss, the charitable and friendly Mr Fezziwig, a man who was more a father to him than his own parent.
Fezziwig was beloved by all his employees, and Scrooge remembers the man fondly, although in some versions this is tinged with a hint that the older Scrooge thinks Fezziwig a fool for spending so much on the party and his employees.
The spirit then shows Scrooge the Christmas Eve when his fiancee, Belle called off the engagement as she realised that Scrooge loved money more than her. Scrooge didn’t deny it.
Sometimes the story will also highlight Fan’s death in childbirth here, or show Belle with her husband, wondering what ever became of Scrooge.
These scenes serve as additional exposition, and to reveal additional emotional pressures on Scrooge, Christmas took away his beloved sister and his fiancee (who still thinks of him, and what might have been, granting him permission to do the same).
Scrooge begs, pleads and even attacks the spirit in some versions to cause the visit to end. He finds himself in his bedroom and immediately falls into bed to sleep.
Ghost of Christmas Present
It turns out that it is actually the next day, as Scrooge is soon confronted by the sounds of a party that draw him from the bedroom where he finds the second spirit.
Looking like the Victorian concept of Father Christmas (the pre-Santa Claus) who is brown or red-haired, bearded and wears green robes. He is accompanied by a feast and drink that in some versions approaches bacchanalia.
This spirit takes Scrooge across Victorian Britain, to view how people celebrate the feast. They stop in at the Cratchit house (and sees the already ill Tiny Tim) and the party of his nephew.
In both cases those present mention Scrooge, first Bob raises a toast to Scrooge, although his wife shouts that down, secondly his nephew Fred defends him at his party. He says he won’t speak ill of his Uncle as the man is his own worst enemy. Fred tells everyone present that he pities his uncle, who will never stop to enjoy a pleasant moment, because he chooses not to. He then toasts the old man.
But the Ghost appears to be aging rapidly as he shows him these events, and by the end, at a Twelfth Night Children’s party the Ghost is old and grey (but still not quite the full Santa). Scrooge points out this to the spirit who tells him that he lives only for the days of Christmas. Next year will be another spirit, and that his Christmas ends with the stroke of midnight.
Of course then the clock strikes midnight and Scrooge is approached by the final spirit.
Ghost Of Christmas Yet To Come
The final ghost appears as a hooded, figure, occasionally skeletal, but often just a shadow in a cloak.
Scrooge follows the figure out into London and hears people discussing a dead man, and how unlikely they are to attend his funeral.
He finds out that the dead man was universally despised, and many feel that his dying alone and unattended was a judgment for the way he had lived his life.
Scrooge is dismayed, and asks the spirit if anyone in this city felt anything for the loss of this man’s life. The ghost whisks him to the home of a couple who are discussing how the man’s death has left them enough time to arrange a way out of the debt that they owed the dead man. They it seems are happy at the man’s death for the reprieve it has brought them.
Scrooge is even further saddened and asks the spirit to show him any tenderness around death. The spirit leads him to the Cratchit’s home, where the family are mourning the passing of Tiny Tim. Bob relates how Fred Scrooge’s nephew had been kind, asking after them in their loss.
Scrooge realises he does not know the name of the man who died and asks the spirit to show him.
The spirit leads him to the churchyard and shows him his own grave. In many movie adaptations the spirit pushes him into the grave at this point, but either way Scrooge awakens in his bed.
The End Of It
Scrooge awakens to discover it is only Christmas Day, the spirits have returned to him all the days he missed in their company.
He is a changed man, delighted to be alive on Christmas Day. He sends a boy to buy, and have sent to the Cratchits, the largest turkey in the butchers, without revealing who the benefactor would be. He gave charity to those he had denied, and met his Nephew Fred and his wife and friends for Christmas Dinner. The next day he even gave Bob a raise, long deserved, he said.
The Time Travel
There are several moments discussed that may well be time-travel in the story.
Scrooge sees years into the past with a clarity that goes beyond his normal memories. He even sees things that we can assume he never knew. He watched Belle and her husband talking, it is doubtful that Scrooge had much idea what happened to Belle after she broke off his engagement. It is, of course, possible that his unconscious mind simply extrapolated the entire thing, perhaps from an unnoticed newspaper announcement. These sections might be dismissed as Scrooge could be dreaming it from hints of memories he could not consciously remember.
The events of the future are also perhaps easily dismissed as simply an old man’s unconscious mind warning him that he will die alone and unmissed, unless he changes his ways. There is very little information revealed that couldn’t have been created by Scrooge’s imagination.
It is, ironically perhaps, the ghost of Christmas Present that presents the best evidence for Scrooge actually time-travelling.
The events that Scrooge sees as occurring in his own time include events that Scrooge has no knowledge of. Including, how the poor and destitute lived in Victorian England. It was these events that Dickens intended to light a fire under the people to change their attitudes towards the poor and Christmas. They are not events easily imagined by Scrooge, he would be unlikely to know the plight of the poor himself. He certainly wouldn’t know the Christmas traditions of Miners in Cornwall (which rarely makes it into the cinematic versions but gets a section in the novella).
While the visions of the past may be dismissed as a trick of memory, and the vision of the future be dismissed as imagination and an old man’s fear of death, the visions of the present (and actually near future) are not so easily cast aside.
In fact, we later see that Uncle Ebenezer’s dream of his nephew Fred’s party is correct in many details, although he altered it with his own presence. We might also presume the details of the Cratchit’s Christmas are equally accurate in the details, had Scrooge not also altered it…
Mechanism and Potential For Paradox
Did Scrooge actually travel in time with the Ghosts?
Well, there is a shocking amount of ‘evidence’ in the form of transcripts from spiritualist mediums, that ghosts are not bound by time as we are. Additional anecdotal evidence of consequence free time-travel is also recorded by those who practice Astral Projection, with the most advanced Astral travellers talking about coloured pools of liquid in the Astral plane that are nothing less than time portals.
Assuming that the Ghosts were able to separate Scrooge’s spirit from his body, there is no reason they couldn’t have carried it through time with them, showing him the actual past, present and future.
Most intriguing of all is that, by being nothing more than a disembodied consciousness in the past, there seems to be no way for Scrooge to interact with the past and create any form of paradox. He is free to watch and listen, safe in the knowledge that he can change nothing as he is the ghost to these visions of the past.
But that isn’t actually what the ghosts claim, they state that what Scrooge sees are Shadows of what had happened, and nothing more (we can assume the same for the present and the future). The ghosts essentially created an illusion that Scrooge could see, that showed him the visions they wished him to see. Obviously there is not much difference between an illusion and a hallucination, and if they made him hallucinate the visions then Occam’s razor will neatly cut them from the story as hallucinations too.
And there is, of course, an inherent paradox to the story. By showing him the past, the present and the future, the spirits seek to change Scrooge’s character and his future. By being shown his future, it is altered, an obvious paradox to a fixed time-line universe.
The Ghost of a Paradox
The events that Scrooge foresaw as shown him by the Ghost of Christmas Present do not actually come to pass the way he foresaw.
The Cratchits received instead a mystery turkey, with no idea who sent it, and so did not need to purchase a goose.
Scrooge attended the party of his nephew and so Fred and his friends (who did all attend the party, as Dickens notes in the end) do not discuss him or his miserly nature. Instead, they celebrate the day with him in good cheer.
Tiny Tim did not die within the year, which two Ghosts told him would occur.
So do these changes represent a temporal paradox?
No, they don’t actually. They are failed prophesies, and nothing more. This means either Scrooge did change his future from that he was shown, or that the whole thing was nothing more than a very bizarre dream, brought on by guilt, and the events of the previous day.
In fact, the whole structure of the events that occurred has much more in common with a morality play than time-travel. All of Scrooge’s lonely, self-loathing behaviour comes to a head that day, and he dreams the encounter with Marley, and everything else.
Marley warns him to change his ways, not because Marley fears for his friend from Hell, but because Scrooge sees himself becoming Marley, and fears his own approaching death.
Scrooge is driven by his own unconscious mind to examine and reframe his life. He hates Christmas because of his uncaring father, because of the loss of his loving sister, and his fiancee. These events were always associated with that time of year, colouring his perspective and generally making him an ogre. His desire to change, perceived through the dream as the Ghosts and events he saw, attempts to reframe these issues.
Christmas was a time for family, his sister’s love called to him. The loss of his sister in childbirth had caused him to unconsciously blame his nephew for her death. The dream reminded him that she wouldn’t have wanted that, that Fred was family and he cared for his uncle as his mother would have, and as he should care for Fred.
His fiancée Belle did not leave him because it was Christmas, but because he placed his career and wealth before everything else in his life, including her. He changes from blaming the season, to blaming himself, and then can move past that, even forgiving her.
He remembers his first boss, Mr Fezziwig, with such kindness and realises that it was not the man’s business acumen, or wealth, that he respected, but the man’s heart. He was fun to work for, because he cared. This memory causes Scrooge to reassess how he treats Bob. He wants Bob to love him, as he loved Mr Fezziwig.
So No Ghosts?
Well, no, but I do find it hard to dismiss the whole thing as merely a dream.
The Ghosts provide Scrooge with too much information that he shouldn’t have had access to, at least consciously.
Scrooge had no reason to know the size and health of Bob’s family, or the names of Fred’s friends (or even the fact Fred was married it seems), and yet these details are known to him, although it may be possible that as Fred and Bob chat in the office before Scrooge (in the beginning of the story) that these conversations have occurred many times, and while Scrooge paid no conscious attention to what was discussed, his unconscious mind took in such details.
Perhaps other conversations and newspaper articles and the like, that discussed the issues of the poor in London, or miners in Cornwall, also merged into the dream. It is possible, and perhaps as likely, that what we see as detailed and correct was actually pure Dickensian fantasy (sadly it wasn’t, Dickens was described at the time as being far too accurate in his depictions of the poor of London).
Of course, there is the issue that spontaneous changes of personality to this extent are exceedingly rare. Rarer still when they have no inciting moment or event that forced the issue in reality.
Here we have a man that had a dream that changed his life, such things are practically unheard of. Usually this sort of change in personality would require a significant trauma (that could not be easily dismissed as a dream) or some neurological condition such as dementia. Scrooge does not seem like a dementia victim, he has no problems with his memory, or indeed any other condition, he just awakens changed.
TL;DR
Ghosts might be able to travel in time without creating paradoxes, as they only observe and cannot change the past, but it is most likely that Scrooge dreamt the whole thing. However, to create such a profound change, in the mind of one so stubborn and set in his ways, seems unlikely by anything that could be easily dismissed as a dream.
And in case you missed the last few installments of Popcorn Paradoxes…
Steampunk Time Sleds (The Time Machine)
Rocket Sled Madness (Timecop)
Twelve Monkeys
The Philosophy of Time-Travel (Donnie Darko)
The Circuits of History (Bill & Ted)
Steampunk Time Sleds (The Terminator)
CJ Moseley
Latest posts by CJ Moseley (see all)
- Popcorn Paradoxes: Time in a Box - August 23, 2018
- Popcorn Paradoxes: Blackouts and Nosebleeds - July 12, 2018
- Popcorn Paradoxes: Junkie With A Blunderbuss - April 26, 2018