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Briefly, too, the Spirit has shown Scrooge how lighthouse-keepers celebrate Christmas, perhaps at the famous Eddystone Light off the coast of Cornwall. The presence of the tiller in the illustration is highly surprising, since Dickens specifically mentions "the wheel" in the passage which Eytinge has thus realised in "Over the Sea" (p. 74), the twelfth full-page illustration in his sequence:

Again the Ghost sped on, above the black and heaving sea — on, on — until, being far away, as he told Scrooge, from any shore, they lighted on a ship. They stood beside the helmsman at the wheel, the look-out in the bow, the officers who had the watch; dark, ghostly figures at their stations; but every man among them hummed a Christmas tune, or had a Christmas thought, or spoke below his breath to his companions of some bygone Christmas Day, with homeward hopes belonging to it. [Stave Three, "The Second of the Spirits"]

Scrooge takes pleasure in the sea men's obvious reverence for the holiday and their having a kinder word for each other because of it. Thus, the scene marks the beginning of Scrooge's reclamation as he can again identify his own humanity with those so different in class and occupation from himself. As he laughs, he finds himself at the home of his own nephew, whose good wishes and offer of yuletide hospitality he had rejected in Stave One.

Bibliography

Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol in Prose: being a Ghost Story of Christmas. Il. Sol Eytinge, Jr. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1868.

Hearne, Michael Patrick, ed. The Annotated Christmas Carol. New York: Avenel, 1989.

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Last modified 328 August 2011