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IN THE ALLEGORY OF SCROOGE'S CONVERSION, Dickens' appeal, written in what were called the “Hungry Forties,” was to the “Ghost of an Idea”: of a crisis of conscience in “the selfishness and indifference of the prosperous classes, who parrot phrases about the surplus population and assume their social responsibilities to be fully discharged when they paid their taxes.” It is the reader's social conscience and charitable feelings that Dickens urgently and deeply touches. “The shame and horror of desperate poverty and the danger to society” that is represented by the apparitions of future “Ignorance and Want” impress upon us the very urgent social need for Scrooge's change of heart and mind (Slater, 1971, in Dickens, 1843). His success in this is tremendously relieving to the reader.
From a child psychotherapy and developmental psychology perspective, however, my aim is to think about Scrooge less as social allegory and more in terms of what Dickens allows us to understand about him as a family member, as an individual with an emotional life. His apparent selfishness and indifference seem closely bound up with his own emotional ignorance and want, which Dickens explores in terms of his emotionally deprived relationships in the past and his self-imposed isolation in the present. Dickens hints at some of the inner workings of Scrooge's character and its change through a