51 pages • 1 hour read
Samantha SilvaMr. Dickens And His Carol
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens is a renowned author in Victorian England and the protagonist of the novel. Normally a compassionate, generous, and jovial man, the failure of his beloved novel Chuzzlewit and his financial woes trouble him. They eventually cause him to lash out at his family and friends, causing conflicts in his relationships. Also, while he is more frugal and sensible with money than his father and brother, he is sometimes generous to a fault, especially with his children. He also makes impulsive and problematic decisions, such as meeting with his former love, Maria Beadnell, to gain inspiration for his Christmas book even though he is married and does not love her anymore. He also displays a somewhat unhealthy obsession with Eleanor Lovejoy, even going so far as to stalk her on several occasions. However, although his relationship with Eleanor verges on a romantic infatuation, he remains loyal to his wife Catherine and misses her deeply after she takes the children to Scotland for Christmas.
The Search for Inspiration defines Dickens’s literary and spiritual journey as Eleanor and Timothy Lovejoy come into his life and radically change his outlook. As he writes the first, cynical version of his Christmas book, he struggles to find things to write about and suffers from writer’s block, feeling that he has “no inspiration, no source, no reservoir of words and feelings, no one to prop him up or spur him on” (72). However, his writer’s block significantly improves after he meets Eleanor. When she uses theater props at the Folly theater to disguise Dickens as an old man and help him to traverse London unrecognized, she inadvertently helps to inspire his creation of Ebenezer Scrooge. After his first draft is stolen and he talks to Eleanor about his traumatic experience of seeing his father carted away to the debtor’s prison, he uses these and other memories to inspire the rewrite, which becomes A Christmas Carol. Through this process, he finally succeeds at Balancing Artistic Integrity and Commercial Success. Confronting his past is an integral part of this process, for in doing so, he starts to regain the Christmas spirit and learns to uphold his artistic vision and spread his values about human compassion even as his latest publication enjoys wild commercial success.
During the progressive stages of his inner transformation, he must confront his lingering trauma over being separated from his family as a child; his time working off his father’s debts at Warren’s Blacking Warehouse near Christmas still haunt him now, and he blames his father for getting into debt abandoning him. Even in his present-day circumstances, he still feels like he is the parent in the relationship. This deep wound combines with other current resentments to fill him with the bitterness and cynicism that lead him to take on the miserly persona of Scrooge. As the narrative states, “He was done taking care of [John]. The piddling, niggling, trifling sums. Too many years of it, too little of being cared for back” (149). Although he continues to give money to his father and brother, his resentment reaches its peak after he starts writing his book, and he cuts them off completely. His trauma also makes him relate to Ebenezer Scrooge so powerfully that he defends the character’s cruelty to Forster. It is only through Eleanor’s positive influence that he is eventually able to realize The Essence of the Christmas Spirit and regain his joy and hope. This allows him to rewrite his book and win back the public’s approval and support, and he also manages to restore his relationships with his family and friends.
Eleanor Lovejoy
Eleanor Lovejoy is a former seamstress and an understudy at the Folly theater, and she is also a crucial a supporting character in the novel. She appears after the Clock Tower chimes midnight, quickly befriending Charles Dickens. She deeply admires his works and helps to inspire him by disguising him as an old man. She becomes increasingly fond of Dickens and the novel implies that she had fallen in love with him. However, she knows that they cannot be together, for as the narrative will eventually reveal, she is actually a ghost. In the days and weeks before Dickens discovers her true nature, she remains steadfastly kind and modest, but she is fiercely protective of her son, Timothy. For example, she becomes angry at Dickens for the first time in the novel when she learns that he scared Timothy. Above all else, she is determined to help her son and is happy when Dickens befriends the boy. Throughout the narrative, she drives The Search for Inspiration and helps Dickens to discover The Essence of the Christmas Spirit by encouraging him to regain his hope for humanity. She reminds Dickens that the most important thing about Christmas is helping people feel hope and reminding them that there is still good in the world. She continues to support him as he rewrites his Christmas book but disappears when the Clock Tower chimes again.
After she is revealed to be a ghost, her intentions become clear to Dickens. Though she returned to the world of the living to inspire Dickens to regain his Christmas spirit and write again, she did so “all for the sake of her son” (209). She came back as a ghost to inspire her son’s favorite writer to help Timothy regain his Christmas spirit and provide him with people who will love and care for him. With her goal complete, she leaves so that Dickens can read his completed book to Timothy.
John Forster
John Forster is Charles Dickens’s best friend and his representative. Forster gives Dickens advice and handles many of his business affairs, including legal issues and his relatives’ and friends’ unending demands for money. Though Forster supports Dickens’s artistic creativity, he often dislikes the writer’s impulsive and emotionally-driven behaviors. He also finds Dickens prone to bouts of emotional weakness that lead to pain and or difficulty, and he tries to encourage Dickens to make sensible business decisions. Despite these challenges, Forster remains loyal to Dickens and forgives him quickly at the end of the novel. Forster often acts as the voice of reason, giving as realistic advice. For example, he warns Dickens that seeing Maria again is a bad idea, and he is proven right when Maria visits Catherine and tells her of his visit, which causes Catherine to temporarily leave him.
He also warns Dickens about becoming too obsessed and too familiar with Eleanor by reminding him that he is married. Due to his logical nature and protectiveness of Dickens, he distrusts Eleanor and believes that she is trying to ruin him. This disagreement causes a temporary rift in his friendship with the writer, for Dickens ends their friendship after Forster accuses Eleanor of stealing the manuscript. After the success of A Christmas Carol and the start of the Christmas party, Forster and Dickens reconcile.
Timothy Lovejoy
Timothy Lovejoy is Eleanor Lovejoy’s young, orphaned son. Timothy greatly admires Dickens; both of his parents read Dickens’s books to him before their deaths. He now sells sketches of Dickens to survive and holds the writer’s works as prized possessions. Although he has been inspired by the books and was given a happy life by his mother despite his family’s poverty, he loses his Christmas spirit after his mother’s untimely death. When Eleanor’s ghost disappears, Dickens fulfills her wish and reads A Christmas Carol to Timothy, who tells Dickens that before he heard A Christmas Carol the second time at the public reading, he that that he “might never know Christmas again” (219). Dickens then takes him in so that he will not have to spend Christmas alone and will have people to love and care for him in Eleanor’s absence.
