Ghost of Christmas Past

The contradictions in the Spirits appearance

’Its was strange figure - like a child: yet not so like a child as an old man’

• Entity whose completely unfulfilled potential and yet whose entity has been entirely fulfilled

• In a constant state of flux

• Dickens is creating a being which is so much and so little at the same time

‘The figure itself fluctuated in its distinctness: being now a thing with one arm, now with. one leg, now with twenty kegs, now a pair of legs without a head, now a head without a body: of which dissolving parts, no outline would be visible’

• Oxymoron

• Capable of anything like a human baby

• Scrooge appears as inferior as the spirits etherial which shows a power imbalence

• Scrooge was not always this way, he once had the ability to be whoever he chose and he can still go back

‘The Ghost stopped at a certain warehouse door, and asked Scrooge if he knew it"

• The spirit is omniscient

• The spirits know scrooge better that scrooge knows himself

• This suggests supernatural qualities

Summary of the Ghost of Christmas Past

A being of no fixed form, the ghost of Christmas Past oxymoronic appearance is representative of human potential. Apparently omniscient, the Spirit's didactic purposes become clear as the second stave progresses.