The working title of The Waste Land was He Do the Police in Different Voices, a quotation from Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1865). The sentence points to key elements of Eliot’s poem that we could consider “dramatic”: effective characterisation, dialectal features, ventriloquism or dialogic scenes. We know that Eliot was particularly fond of Dickens’s characters and their language. In two of his plays, we may also find echoes of the structure and symbolism of A Christmas Carol (1843).
In The Cocktail Party, at the end of Act One, Edward Chamberlayne, alone in his flat in the evening, receives the unexpected visit of an “unidentified guest”. Lavinia (Edward’s wife) has left him, and the guest promises to “bring her back from the dead,” explaining that “we die to each other daily,” and must meet again as strangers. As an example, he refers to the “affectionate ghosts” of childhood, such as “the lively bachelor uncle at the Christmas party,” whom we see rarely or after many years. Before leaving, the unidentified guest – like Marley in Dickens’s tale – warns Edward to “await your visitors,” to welcome them as strangers, and even become a stranger to himself. The first visitor is Celia (Edward’s lover), the second visitor is Peter (Lavinia’s lover but in love with Celia), and the third is Lavinia. Their meeting, set against a past and present of misdirected love, will be decisive for their future.
In The Elder Statesman, Lord Claverton’s prospect of peace after his retirement from politics is disturbed by the return of two characters whose lives he negatively conditioned in their youth. He accustomed Fred Culverwell, his contemporary at Oxford, to a life of extravagance fatally resulting in financial crime. Mrs Carghill, on the other hand, was ruthlessly forsaken after a promise of marriage. Both Culverwell and Carghill confront Eliot’s protagonist with his blameworthy behaviour, which casts a shadow on his irreproachable reputation: they cause him to make amends. Lord Claverton refers to them as “the ghosts who haunted me,” “spectres from my past”. His past and present life, about to change as a result of these encounters, seems equally unreal. As he tells his daughter Monica and her fiancé, “I see myself emerging / From my spectral existence into something like reality”.
The Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come teach Scrooge to honour the spirit of Christmas, founded on charity and compassion. His story exemplifies the archetype of rebirth or transformation, made possible by spiritual guidance. This is also crucial in most of Eliot’s plays: Edward Chamberlayne will choose the positive way of marital harmony (those around him will also find their way), and Lord Claverton will face death having learnt to love selflessly. “God bless us, everyone!”