What does the ghost of christmas past represent?

Question

ok, i'm reading "A Christmas Carol", by Charles Dickens, in school. i have to write an essay about it. i can choose 3 essays to write about and i want to do the one about the ghosts. the thing is we have to know what each ghost represents...i know the last 2 but not the 1st.

we need to know what it's appearence and it's attitude represents about the past.

Answer 1

Well, Proud Liberal, writing out of "Personal brilliance," has it right on the money: "Lost opportunities, previous mistakes, wasted time, and most importantly, the moment we are born, is the moment we begin to die!"

EXCEPT that's only part of the answer.

In Dickens' time, Christmas was thought of as a time when ghosts were permitted to escape their graves and walk the earth again (as Jacob Marley is doing). That led to Christmas being seen as a holiday for celebrating memories, a time of pleasant nostalgia and reminiscence as well as grief for lost loved ones.

So the Ghost of Christmas Past does both, starting with glorious party times, a time of love and laughter (and a hint of romance). The musical movie Scrooge, with Albert Finney in the title role, got it right. The Ghost of Christmas Past is a huge, loud, uproarious Father Christmas-type figure.

The Ghost of Christmas Past represents Memories. If you trace the history of Christmas as a holiday, as some historians have done [1], you will see that this story by Dickens, as much as Clement Moore's The Night Before Christmas, helped establish the holiday in the 19th century and determine its nature: a time of pleasure, of family, AND of memories of the past. Hence, all the traditions, the folklore, the tree and the cards and the feast repeated each year--the Victorianism of Christmas.

Memories are made of this!

(And, yes, Christmas is still a time of suffering for those who are grieving, especially the first Christmas after the loss of a loved one. It is a time of loneliness, even bitterness, for those whose memories are unpleasant or who have no one to celebrate with. But that's only one focus of the Ghost of Christmas Past, not the one that caught on from Dickens' tale.)



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Answer 2

The Ghost of Christmas Past represents Scrooge's past (when he was a boy to eerily manhood)

Hope this helps

And you can also look it up on Google what the ghosts mean.

Answer 3

Lost opportunities, previous mistakes, wasted time, and most importantly, the moment we are born, is the moment we begin to die!