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imagining that he has somehow slept through three nights. He is amazed to discover that it is still only the morning of Christmas Day. He thus has a chance to express his new found self in a tornado of generosity and goodwill to everyone he meets and knows. He arranges for a vast turkey to be sent round to Bob Cratchit, rushes to offer the charitable gentlemen a contribution so generous as to be almost embarrassing and finally breaks in on his astonished nephew and his family to join their celebrations. The following morning he amazes Cratchit by raising his salary, and from that day forth Ebenezer Scrooge becomes like a second father to Tiny Tim, `who did NOT die', and `as good a friend, as good a master and as good a man as the old city knew'.1

Crime and Punishment

The action of A Christmas Carol centres almost entirely round the twofold process necessary to bring about Scrooge's `rebirth'. The purpose of the succession of nightmarish apparitions is to open out his awareness, to allow him to see himself as others see him and to see the world from a new centre of perspective; and at the same time, as an inseparable part of this process, to awaken in him the ability to feel for others - just as Kay learned to see and to feel when the splinters of mirror were removed from his eye and his heart. And the central redeeming figure of the story who, more than anyone else, awakens his power to love is Tiny Tim, the son he never had, the Child.

Another nineteenth-century novel which presents the whole pattern of the Rebirth, from the moment when the hero first passes under the deadly spell of darkness through to his final liberation, is Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. The opening scenes, in which we meet the hero Rodion Raskolnikov as a poor young student in St Petersburg, are directly akin to the opening of Tragedy. In his hopeless, drifting life in the great city, surrounded by human wreckage like the drunken civil servant Marmeladov, whose daughter Sonia has been driven into prostitution, Raskolnikov becomes obsessed by the fantasy that if only he can commit some vast crime he will somehow have demonstrated his superiority to the hundreds of thousands of ordinary human beings around him. Like Napoleon, he will have shown that he is not to be confined by the humdrum framework of morality appropriate to everyone else (as he says later `I wanted to see whether I could step over or not').

He finds his Focus in the plan to murder an unattractive old woman who acts as the neighbourhood moneylender. For some time we see him going through `an agonising inner struggle, very much a 'divided self' as he contemplates the enormity of what part of him desires. On the one hand he has a dream of himself as a young boy, watching with horror as a drunken peasant clubs his horse to death: young Raskolnikov rushes in at the last moment to kiss the dying horse on the lips. On the other, he sees `signs' that he is right to proceed, as when he happens to overhear a student in a restaurant arguing that it would not be immoral to kill some `stupid, senseless, worthless, wicked and decrepit old hag, who is of no use to anybody and who actively does harm to everybody'. Even when Raskolnikov is making his final preparations `they all possessed one strange characteristic: the more final they became, the more absurd and horrible they at once appeared in his eyes'. But he steels himself. He visits the old woman in her flat and hacks her to death with a hatchet, only to discover to his horror that her friend Lisaveta is also there and, unplanned, he has to kill her too.

Having committed his `dark act' and managed to escape safely, leaving no clues, Raskolnikov does not, however, feel himself to be a great hero, liberated from the morality binding ordinary mortals. He finds himself more and more troubled. He is called to the police station about some quite different matter and hears talk of the murder of the two women. He faints. Everyone is now talking about the murders. Raskolnikov begins to see `signs' that he is suspected, as when an unknown man