Small Things Like These

Victorian, British writer Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843) appears both explicitly and implicitly in Keegan’s novel. Mrs. Wilson gifts Furlong the novel one Christmas when he is still a child. Described as “an old book with a hard, red cover and no pictures, which smelled of must” (17), the gift seems both antiquated and punishing to the child in its hard, pictureless state. However, it turns out to be a pedagogical instrument, as Mrs. Wilson encourages Furlong to “use the big dictionary and to look up the words” (20). Her belief that “everyone should have a vocabulary” (20) and her encouragement of Furlong at school demonstrate her egalitarian ideals and frame her in opposition to A Christmas Carol’s miserly protagonist, Ebenezer Scrooge, as she shares her resources to nurture those who are less fortunate than she. Furlong, who remembers the book and the education that came along with it, akin to Scrooge’s remembering past Christmases, asks his wife for David Copperfield, another Dickens novel, for this year’s Christmas gift. His request for a book reflects his warm memories of Mrs. Wilson and the positive impact of her gift, which set him on a quest of learning and self-improvement.