the market-town

The market-town is a location in Ebenezer Scrooge's past, the setting of his childhood school and the scene of his first emotional encounter with the Ghost of Christmas Past, where he confronts the loneliness of his youth and the loss of his sister Fan.

Identity and Setting

The market-town appears in the second chapter of A Christmas Carol as the destination of Scrooge's first journey with the Ghost of Christmas Past. It is a small, recognizable place with a bridge, a church, and a winding river, approached by a well-remembered lane. The town is surrounded by broad fields, and the road leading to it is lined with gates, posts, and trees that Scrooge, despite having forgotten them for many years, can still identify blindfolded. The town is also the site of the school, a large house of dull red brick with a weather-cock surmounted cupola and a bell, now fallen into disrepair: its walls are damp and mossy, its windows broken, its gates decayed, and its stables overrun with fowls and grass. The interior is cold, vast, and poorly furnished, with an earthly savour and a chilly bareness that Scrooge associates with getting up by candle-light and not having enough to eat.

Scrooge's Childhood and Emotional Reckoning

It is at this school that Scrooge, guided by the Spirit, first sees his former self as a solitary boy, neglected by his friends and left alone during the holidays. The sight of the lonely child reading near a feeble fire causes Scrooge to weep, and every sound in the house—the squeak of mice, the drip from a water-spout, the sigh of leafless boughs—falls upon his heart with softening influence. The market-town is thus the site of Scrooge's first emotional breakthrough, where the hard, flinty exterior he has maintained for decades begins to crack. It is here that he exclaims over the characters from his childhood reading—Ali Baba, Valentine and Orson, Robin Crusoe and his parrot—in a voice between laughing and crying, and here that he mutters, "I wish... but it's too late now," before confessing that he would like to have given something to the boy who sang a Christmas Carol at his door the previous night.

The Arrival of Fan and the Promise of Home

The market-town school is also the scene of the arrival of Scrooge's sister Fan, who comes to bring him home for good. She is a little girl, much younger than the boy, who darts in and puts her arms about his neck, calling him her "dear, dear brother." She tells him that their father has become kinder, that home is like Heaven, and that she has come in a coach to fetch him. The schoolmaster appears, a terrible voice in the hall, and the children are given a decanter of curiously light wine and a block of curiously heavy cake before being sent off in a chaise. The Ghost of Christmas Past notes that Fan was "always a delicate creature, whom a breath might have withered," but that she had a large heart. Scrooge confirms that she died a woman and had one child: his nephew Fred. The market-town thus becomes the locus of both Scrooge's deepest childhood loneliness and the memory of the only familial love he ever knew, a love that ended with Fan's death and that he has since rejected in the person of Fred.

Contrast with the Urban and the Obscure

The market-town stands in sharp contrast to the other locations Scrooge visits. Unlike the counting-house in the City of London, the foggy streets of Christmas Eve, or the obscure, foul quarter where old Joe's shop is located, the market-town is a place of open fields, clear winter light, and snow-covered ground. It is a pastoral, rural setting that represents a lost innocence and a simpler time. The journey to the market-town is the first of the Spirit's lessons, and it is the only one that takes Scrooge out of the city entirely. The memory of this place, and of the boy he was there, becomes the foundation upon which his later transformation is built. When Scrooge awakens on Christmas morning, his first act is to run to the window and open it, and the description of the day—"clear, bright, jovial, stirring, cold"—echoes the clarity and cold of the winter day he walked through with the Ghost of Christmas Past on the road to the market-town.