Scrooge's fireplace appears to be based on
the one at 18 St. Mary's Place, The Brook, Chatham, where Dickens lived briefly as a child in
1821€“22. This too was surrounded with painted tiles illustrating scenes from the Scriptures.
Dickens gives a list of the illustrations in Stave I:
There were Cains and Abels, Pharaohs daughters; Queens of Sheba, Angelic messengers
descending through the air on clouds like feather-beds, Abrahams, Belshazzars, Apostles putting
off to sea in butter-boats, hundreds of figures to attract his thoughts
The selection of Cain and Abel certainly seems significant.
Scrooge's callous statement that the poor are not his business echoes Cain's question: "Am
I my brother's keeper?" This question is answered in the affirmative by Marley when he says
that mankind was his business, to which he failed to attend in his lifetime. Pharaoh's daughter
offers a contrast, since she looked after Moses, who was very far from being related to her and
whom she merely found in a basket.
The Queen of Sheba may not fit into the
list quite so well, since she is the only figure dropped by Dickens in his public readings of
. She is certainly associated with gift-giving, however. There are so many
stories about Abraham that it is difficult to know which one Dickens has in mind; perhaps the
near-sacrifice of Isaac, which would fit in with the themes of death, infancy, and
responsibility. Belshazzar, though a neutral figure in the Book of Daniel, was a tyrant in later
Jewish tradition and, like Scrooge, was famously weighed in the balance and found wanting by a
ghostly power.
No comments:
Post a Comment