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"I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the past, the present, and the future . . . . Oh, tell me I may sponge away the writing on this stone."
Harold Copping
1911
Black-and-white lithograph
15.9 cm by 11.2 cm (6 ¼ by 4 ⅜ inches), framed.
From A Christmas Carol (1911), p. 115.
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
The finger still was there.
"Spirit!" he cried, tight clutching at its robe, "hear me! I am not the man I was. I will not be the man I must have been but for this intercourse. Why show me this, if I am past all hope?"
For the first time the hand appeared to shake.
"Good Spirit," he pursued, as down upon the ground he fell before it: "your nature intercedes for me, and pities me. Assure me that I yet may change these shadows you have shown me by an altered life?"
The kind hand trembled.
"I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach. Oh, tell me I may sponge away the writing on this stone!" ["Stave Four: The Last of The Three Spirits," pp. 115-116]
Again, as in all previous treatments of this theme going all the way back to John Leech's in 1843, having just seen his name engraved on the tombstone, Scrooge is beseeching the Spirit of Christmas-yet-to-Come for mercy or relief. But what relief or consolation can the spirit guide of future events offer the now-reformed miser? He points inexorably down, but remains mute, and does not seem to acknowledge Scrooge's heart-felt petition. Whatever remedy is available will be of Scrooge's own making. The context is familiar by now: the headstones clumped together, the skeletal tree, and the iron railing around the burial plots. What, then, is different here? Scrooge's anxious expression as he gazes up at the spectre is far more subtle than that of Eytinge's penitent, for example. And Scrooge is not prostrate with self-pity as in the versions by Leech, Furniss, and Rackham. What Copping gives Scrooge is hope that he can efface the writing on the tablets of his own life.
Left: John Leech's melodramatic and emotionally charged The Last of the Spirits (penultimate illustration, 1843); left of centre: Eytinge's In the Churchyard (1868); centre: Furniss's's The Last of the Spirits (1910); right of centre: Charles E. Brock's illustration focuses on Scrooge's reaction in Scrooge crept towards it, trembling as he went (1905).
Left: Arthur Rackham's's preparing the reader for the famous scene in the graveyard, Heading to Stave Four (1915). Right: Charles Green's Scrooge and the Third Spirit, set above Scrooge's own resting place (1912).
Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being A Ghost Story for Christmas. Illustrated by John Leech. London: Chapman & Hall, 1843.
Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol in Prose: being a ghost story for Christmas. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Junior. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1869.
Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol. Illustrated by Harold Copping. London, Paris, New, York: Raphael Tuck, 1911.
Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol. Illustrated by Charles Green, R. I. London: A & F Pears, 1912.
Created 6 October 2023