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    The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain
    The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain
    The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain
    Ebook140 pages2 hours

    The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain

    By Charles Dickens

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    In “The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain”, Professor Redlaw nurses grievances and past wrongs done to him as he stares into the fire. Visited by a spirit who appears to him as his phantom twin, he is offered a way to “forget the sorrow, wrong, and trouble” he has known. This intervention has consequences for the people in Redlaw’s life, and leads to a resolution of his troubles. This is the last of the five Dickens Christmas Books that begin with “A Christmas Carol”.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDreamscape Media
    Release dateOct 9, 2018
    ISBN9781974916665
    Author

    Charles Dickens

    Charles Dickens was born in 1812 and grew up in poverty. This experience influenced ‘Oliver Twist’, the second of his fourteen major novels, which first appeared in 1837. When he died in 1870, he was buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey as an indication of his huge popularity as a novelist, which endures to this day.

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    Reviews for The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain

    3.5/5

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    • 4/5
      This (the last of Dickens' five Christmas novellas) is also the longest and densest of the bunch, and has a return to a focus on the Christmas spirit, morality, and redemption that echo back to the best known of the bunch, A Christmas Carol. Redlaw is a lonely and sad Chemistry teacher at a lonely and sad old college tucked into the city of London. Many years ago his best friend betrayed him by marrying Redlaw's fiancée instead of Redlaw's beloved sister, as he had planned. Redlaw's sister ended up dying young and Redlaw has nursed his hurt and anger at his former friend for years. On this cold and dark Christmas eve, a phantom (who looks a lot like the haunted Redlaw) appears to him and offers to make him forget all his sorrows and wrongs. As a twist, he will also bestow this same "gift" upon anyone he encounters. Redlaw agrees but, as you might expect, soon comes to regret his decision. Like many of these novellas, the real fun of the story is in the characters that orbit around our protagonist. In this case, we have the family of servants that keep the college and take care of the on-site faculty, as well as a large and poor but happy family who are boarding a sick student of Redlaw's. There is a lot of humor and love in the description of these characters and a willingness to sink into descriptive reveries that probably have something to do with this being the longest of the novellas. The pacing and flow on this one is a little... odd, which makes it sometimes difficult to follow the thrust of the story or get one's mind around the more philosophical parts of the text, but a little patience is well-rewarded. There is a semi-happy ending to this one, but even in that semi-happiness, this is a pretty dark tale.It also includes one of the best and most semi-colon-laden location descriptions ever, in this paragraph about the old college where Redlaw lives and works. If this kind of writing is your jam, then add this one to your list: "His dwelling was so solitary and vault-like,—an old, retired part of an ancient endowment for students, once a brave edifice, planted in an open place, but now the obsolete whim of forgotten architects; smoke-age-and-weather-darkened, squeezed on every side by the overgrowing of the great city, and choked, like an old well, with stones and bricks; its small quadrangles, lying down in very pits formed by the streets and buildings, which, in course of time, had been constructed above its heavy chimney stalks; its old trees, insulted by the neighbouring smoke, which deigned to droop so low when it was very feeble and the weather very moody; its grass-plots, struggling with the mildewed earth to be grass, or to win any show of compromise; its silent pavements, unaccustomed to the tread of feet, and even to the observation of eyes, except when a stray face looked down from the upper world, wondering what nook it was; its sun-dial in a little bricked-up corner, where no sun had straggled for a hundred years, but where, in compensation for the sun’s neglect, the snow would lie for weeks when it lay nowhere else, and the black east wind would spin like a huge humming-top, when in all other places it was silent and still."
    • 5/5
      The fifth and final of Dickens' Christmas Books and the one I thought was most like A Christmas Carol in quality and in its themes.Mr Redlaw has had many sorrows in his life although he is known as a generous man if gloomy and solitary. He is thinking of his sorrows one Christmas when he is visited by a ghost or spirit which offers him the gift of forgetting all the wrongs and sorrows which weigh on him so heavily."I bear within me a Sorrow and a Wrong. Thus I prey upon myself. Thus, memory is my curse; and, if I could forget my sorrow and my wrong, I would!"Believing that he would be happier without this remembrance, Redlaw agrees and the spirit takes these memories from him but also leaves him with the gift of passing this forgetfulness on to all others that he meets. Dickens uses this gift of forgetfulness powerfully among the strong cast of characters he has included in this novella to teach that it is the memory of our sorrows and sufferings that is the source of our compassion and enables us to forgive others and that without suffering, there can be no true joy.A very powerful story.

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    The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain - Charles Dickens

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