I Will Honour Christmas In My

Spoken by Ebenezer Scrooge in Stave Four of A Christmas Carol (1843), kneeling before the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come after seeing his own name on a gravestone. It is Scrooge's vow of transformation — the climax of the novella's arc — made in desperate appeal to a Spirit who will not speak. The full passage continues: "I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me." Dickens wrote the book in six weeks in the autumn of 1843, driven partly by his anxiety about the condition of England's poor.