SOURCE: “Sponging the Stone: Transformation in A Christmas Carol,” in Dickens Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 4, December, 1994, pp. 172–76.

In the following essay, Patterson contends that to “understand the significance of the Carol is to integrate the psychological and its spiritual message.”

I don't remember reading the book until my adult years, yet Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol seems always to have been with me. The Carol entered my life when I lay on the living room floor with a belly full of Christmas turkey avoiding adult conversation at my grandmother's dinner. My first recollection of the story is in the form of the 1951 American film version Scrooge. Alister Sim, the most robust interpreter of Scrooge, fascinated me by his depiction of a man who starts off as “solitary as an oyster” and winds up a “second father” to orphans, the best neighbor one could possibly imagine. With the annual retelling...