The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain

The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain, A Fancy for Christmas-Time, (better known as The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain) is a novella by Charles Dickens first published in 1848. It is the fifth and last of Dickens' Christmas novellas. The story is more about the spirit of the holidays than about the holidays themselves, harking back to the first of the series, A Christmas Carol. The tale centers around a Professor Redlaw and those close to him.

Plot summary

Redlaw is a teacher of chemistry who often broods over wrongs done him and grief from his past life.

He is haunted by a spirit, who is not so much a ghost as Redlaw's phantom twin and is "an awful likeness of himself...with his features, and his bright eyes, and his grizzled hair, and dressed in the gloomy shadow of his dress..." This spectre appears and proposes to Redlaw that he can allow him to "forget the sorrow, wrong, and trouble you have known...to cancel their remembrance..." Redlaw is hesitant at first, but finally agrees. However, before the spirit vanishes it imposes an additional consequence: "The gift that I have given you, you shall give again, go where you will."

Besides Redlaw, the book is populated with the people of Redlaw's life. Most of them are semi-comical characters such as the Tetterby family who rent a room to one of Redlaw's students and Swidger family who are Redlaw's servants. Milly Swidger, William Swidger's wife, is another of the absolutely and completely good females that frequent many of Dickens' stories.

As a consequence of the ghost's intervention Redlaw is without memories of the painful incidents from his past. He experiences a universal anger that he cannot explain. His bitterness spreads to the Swidgers, the Tetterbys and his student. All become as wrathful as Redlaw himself. The only one who is able to avoid the bitterness is Milly.

The narrative climaxes when Milly presents the moral of the tale: "It is important to remember past sorrows and wrongs so that you can then forgive those responsible and, in doing so, unburden your soul and mature as a human being." With this realization, the novel concludes with everyone back to normal and Redlaw, like Ebenezer Scrooge, a changed, more loving and a whole person, learns to be humble at Christmas.

External links

Online editions

• The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain at Internet Archive.
• The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain at Project Gutenberg
• The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain, a free and easy to read HTML version.
• The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain public domain audiobook from LibriVox