Professor Redlaw believes that memory keeps injury alive in Charles Dickens's The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain Illustrated. A chemistry teacher absorbed by old wrongs, he is visited by a spirit that looks like his own shadowed double. The apparition offers to cancel every recollection of sorrow, trouble, and betrayal.
Redlaw accepts, expecting relief. Instead, the absence of painful memory leaves him with anger whose cause he can no longer name. That bitterness spreads through his contact with the Swidgers, the Tetterbys, and one of his students, damaging the sympathy that ordinarily binds them. Forgetting does not isolate suffering; it removes the experience through which another person's suffering can be recognized.
Milly alone resists the contagion. Her presence gives Redlaw a counterexample to the phantom's bargain and shifts the Christmas tale from private grievance toward shared care. Dickens treats grief as burdensome but morally consequential: erasing it may also erase humility, patience, and fellow feeling. The novella's question is therefore not whether the past can be escaped, but what part of human connection disappears when pain no longer has a history.
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