[3] Indeed, Dickens experienced poverty as a boy when he was forced to work in a blacking factory after his father's imprisonment for debt.

Originally intending to write a political pamphlet titled, An Appeal to the People of England, on behalf of the Poor Man's Child, he changed his mind[4] and instead wrote A Christmas Carol[5] which voiced his social concerns about poverty and injustice.

In this novella, Dickens was innovative in making the existence of the supernatural a natural extension of the real world in which Scrooge and his contemporaries lived.

[1] Dickens making the Christmas Spirits a central feature of his story is a reflection of the early-Victorian interest in the paranormal.

Apart from A Christmas Carol, Dickens also incorporated the gloomy atmosphere and melodrama of Gothic literature into various of his other works, shifting them to a more modern period and an urban setting, for example in Oliver Twist (1837–1838), Bleak House (1854), Great Expectations (1860–1861) and the unfinished Edwin Drood (1870).

As in A Christmas Carol, these novels juxtapose wealthy, ordered, and affluent civilisation with the disorder and barbarity of the poor in the same metropolis.

It was shrouded in a deep black garment, which concealed its head, its face, its form, and left nothing of it visible, save one outstretched hand.

While this may seem an odd choice to modern readers for a Christmas ghost, in the early Victorian era, people would remember their deceased loved ones at Christmastime, which was also a time for reflection at the end of the year.

"[10] Dickens described a similar Christmas spectre in his story "A December Vision" (1850), which also has a slow and unwavering persistence and which also has a shaded face and ghostly eyes.

When it first arrives, Scrooge is fearful of the ghost that the "spirit paused a moment, as observing his condition, and giving him time to recover."

When Scrooge vows to change his ways upon seeing his unloved grave, the ghost's kind hand trembles.

Without becoming benevolent and charitable and without accepting redemption and salvation, Scrooge will suffer the same fate as Marley, weighed down by chains and cash boxes and ledgers and cursed to walk the Earth.

In these scenes, Dickens uses mirroring, for as the Spirit reveals the visions of the future to Scrooge, he fails to recognise what the reader has already seen – that Scrooge sees his future; that the un-mourned dead man is himself; that the bedcurtains in the rag-and-bone shop are his; that the cheap funeral discussed by the city businessmen at the Exchange is his own; that he is the creditor whose death brings hope and relief to an indebted young couple.

[14][17] Scrooge is affected by the significance of these visions of the future, realising that the wretched dead man might be himself, and he implores the Spirit to show tenderness connected with a death; the ghost shows him the Cratchit family mourning the death of Tiny Tim, revealing the identity of the dead man.

Scrooge's past and present actions have left him "solitary as an oyster", and his lonely death is revealed, with no one to mourn and having become an opportunity for others to profit – if only with a free lunch.

The last of the Spirits gives Scrooge a final chance at redemption, to start life anew, and to make reparation to his nephew Fred, to the Cratchits, and the poor of London – his "fellow passengers to the grave".