Thread by @ACCGCSE

“I am as light as a feather”.

Let’s talk about - HEAVINESS & LIGHTNESS.

And MAKING LINKS WITHIN TEXTS. 1/9

This beautiful excerpt, taken from Stave 5, presents the reader with a new & redeemed Scrooge! Up he gets, full of the agility that we see in ‘Old Fezziwig’ (Stave 2 - no coincidence, I’m sure!) - and in great contrast to the stiff gait of Scrooge at the start of the novella. 2/9

“I am as light as a feather”, he declares. And I love that! Dickens revisits ideas around heaviness & lightness throughout the text - memorably, when we are first introduced to Scrooge in Stave 1. We are told that ‘he carried his own low temperature about with him’. 3/9

I love this detail! It’s incredibly subtle, but, the very concept of his low temperature being something that he carries, by default, implies that it can be put down; it isn’t a natural part of him. It almost conjures up an image of it being a cross that he bears -
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but of his own choosing (an idea further embodied by Marley’s character later in the same stave). The weight he carries is burdensome - it ‘stiffened his gait’ and ‘made his thin lips blue’. We could even argue that Dickens draws upon 5/9

the semantic field of death here, to convey that Scrooge’s choices, essentially, ensure that he is not truly living; that he is numb to life; dead inside (& I think that Stave 4 is crucial in embodying his rebirth - or at the v least, the returning to who &what he truly is). 6/9

When Marley’s ghost appears, this idea of heaviness & weight is further embodied via the chains that he has forged ‘of (his) own free will’, ‘link by link and yard by yard’. Therefore, when Scrooge declares that he is ‘as light as a feather’, could this 7/9

relate to the idea that he has freed himself of the metaphorical chains that would have awaited him, and he has chosen to put down the weight & burdens of his past (that manifested in the coldness that he embodied), and he, therefore, feels ‘light’ and free?
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We can further extend this to Scrooge’s observation of Fezziwig in Stave 2 - that he had ‘the power’ to make their work ‘light or burdensome’. In deciding to lighten the burdens of others (the Cratchits, for instance), Scrooge has lightened his own.⛓ 🕯✨ #ACC #ACCRevision 9/9