Christmas

Christmas marks a convergence of financial pressure and threatened secrecy: while overdue bills narrow Lydgate’s attention to his deteriorating circumstances, Raffles’s return on Christmas Eve forces Bulstrode to confront the past he has tried to contain. The holiday’s expectation of settled accounts and domestic ease instead sharpens both men’s anxieties, and Bulstrode’s attempt to send Raffles away ends not in security but in a hundred-pound payment and uncertain respite.

Financial Pressure at Christmas

The season’s customary movement from Christmas to the New Year brings Lydgate no relief. Tradesmen expect payment for goods and services, Dover is threatening to take possession of his furniture, and the fees he received from Freshitt Hall and Lowick Manor have already been absorbed. Slow payments from patients cannot resolve the immediate problem: he would need a thousand pounds to escape his embarrassment and have any reserve left.

The distress is painful not only because of its amount but because it displaces the life Lydgate had meant to lead. He is reduced to thinking about bills, debt, and the prospects of relief when his energy might have been devoted to intellectual work and effective action. Christmas therefore intensifies the contrast between his former purposes and his present preoccupation with money.

Raffles Returns on Christmas Eve

Bulstrode’s expectation that Raffles would return if he were still alive proves correct: Raffles appears at The Shrubs on Christmas Eve. Bulstrode receives him himself and tries to prevent him from communicating with the household. Raffles insists on remaining in the house, and Bulstrode keeps him in his own room, judging that this is less dangerous than allowing him to go into the town.

Raffles is difficult to manage. His restlessness and habitual intemperance make him quick to forget what has been said, while his joking references to having served Bulstrode conceal a calculated effort to extract payment. Bulstrode tells his wife that he is caring for a distressed man who might harm himself, suggests a family connection without stating a direct falsehood, and keeps others from entering the room. Even so, he fears that Raffles may speak openly of the past and that his wife may learn the truth.

The Christmas Morning Confrontation

After a night of anxiety and prayer, Bulstrode resolves to defy Raffles rather than continue accommodating him. He orders his carriage for early morning and wakes Raffles carefully, wary of provoking a disturbance. He then threatens to have Raffles removed by a policeman and refuses to give him money for his expenses if he returns or spreads his stories in town.

The threat works for the moment. Raffles submits, and Bulstrode drives him away before the family’s Christmas breakfast. The servants assume that the visitor is a poor relation whose presence embarrasses their master. On the ten-mile drive, Bulstrode succeeds in removing Raffles from his home, but not in establishing that the threat has ended.

Payment and Temporary Reprieve

At the end of the drive, Raffles has recovered his spirits. Bulstrode gives him a hundred pounds, influenced in part by the sense that Raffles has deteriorated since an earlier payment of two hundred pounds. The payment accompanies Bulstrode’s insistence that he will not be manipulated again, but he does not closely examine all the motives behind his generosity.

Returning to his quiet home, Bulstrode has no confidence that he has bought more than a pause. The episode leaves him acutely aware that his standing depends partly on what others believe about him, and that this imagined fabric of opinion is vulnerable to collapse. Christmas thus becomes a threshold rather than a resolution: Lydgate remains caught in financial anxiety, while Bulstrode has temporarily removed the person who threatens his secret without escaping the fear of what Raffles may reveal.