Charles Dickens' The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain - Review

The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain: Classic literature by Charles Dickens

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


A Yuletide parable of loss and love.

In the days before Christmas, Mr. Redlaw is visited by a spirit, whom he begs to bestow upon him a gift - to remove his sorrow, wrong and trouble from memory.

But with pieces of his past missing, it changes Redlaw beyond recognition. Not only that, but his gift comes with a price - that he will spread its effect to whomever he meets.

As Christmas Day arrives, Redlaw grapples with the curse he was once desperate for, praying its power spreads no further and leaves no one else a mere fragment of themselves.

'The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain' is the fifth and final Christmas book by Charles Dickens, originally published in 1848. Originally subtitled ‘A Fancy for Christmas-Time’, this is a tale told in three acts, a warning to be mindful of what you wish for, of a gift desired without full consideration of its repercussions. The story returns to the theme of ghosts of Dickens’ original classic Christmas book, following forays into goblins and fairies, and lacking any supernatural phenomena in its predecessor, but this time with a difference - the spirit being a shade of the central character's own self, perhaps his darker half, or his higher consciousness.

Probably the darkest of Dickens’ Christmas novellas, the prose is fused with stunning imagery, deeply atmospheric and composed of gothic images, some passages feeling like rich portions of tales of horror, toying with concepts such as a bargain struck with spirits who bestow our wishes at a cost, or the duality of our natures and life’s circumstances, feeling like a precursor to later stories such as Robert Louis Stevenson's ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’. Creating an intricate sense of place and contemporary society, the prose is at moments intensely bleak, with touches of humour gesturing towards farce with certain characters, and in parts dense and descriptive, perfectly conjuring a sense of the early Victorian era almost two centuries later.

At the story's centre is chemistry professor Mr. Redlaw, his benevolence and kind-hearted nature marking him as an antithesis of Ebenezer Scrooge. Lonely and grief-stricken, he desires to forget his pain. Yet, without it, his character sours, with the loss of the memory of events of his past that played their role in creating the man he is today – the gift effectively altering time, as if the entire course of one’s life is changed, creating an entirely different version of oneself. It plays well as a metaphor for aging and declining, perhaps even an observation of what we would today diagnose as dementia, or alternatively for amnesia associated with mental illness, the mind's attempt to protect itself from trauma and subsequent slow regaining of these lost pieces.

As is one of Dickens' signature components, the narrative features a supporting cast of eccentric characters from across the spectrum of Victorian society, illustrating the divide between rich and poor, the privileged and the destitute, the gift soon diffusing through this group, while a mystery presents itself with the curse proving to have no effect on some of the characters while having such a profound effect on others. The novella is primarily message driven, the moral of the story taking centre-stage over plot and character, exploring the concept of true appreciation and gratitude being found in the juxtaposition between joy and suffering - that without the latter, we can never truly appreciate the former; an observation that life and love are an entwined complexity of light and dark. For to forget one's grief, one must forget their love.

Becoming my second favourite of Dickens' Christmas books, ‘The Haunted Man’ is a thought-provoking piece of philosophical fiction, depicting the polarity of the season with its shades of dark and light, good and evil; an astute observation of society, comprised of metaphor and moral complexity. It’s a welcome return to the supernatural manifestation of Christmas magic and the concept Dickens so artfully and more distinctly developed in 'A Christmas Carol' of past, present and future co-existing during the season, also as much a time to reflect and acknowledge the ills and terrors of the world as to rejoice in its beauty and pleasures, and ultimately conveying the enriching salvation of the power of love.

While Dickens may not have succeeded in re-creating the power and majesty of his classic story in the succeeding four fables, though this a feat perhaps impossible to achieve, he once again presents an enjoyable and timeless tale with a resounding moral in ‘The Haunted Man’ - we can either allow the ghosts of our minds and memories to haunt us, or we can embrace them as part of us and our histories and seek to make peace with them.



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