All Gothic literature is constructed on the technology of horror or terror production. The process of explication and narrating the story makes the reader sense these emotions, giving the reader aesthetic pleasure. The common impression of the gothic text is formed by the narrative, which simultaneously forces fear and sensation of a lack of threat at the same time, that is to say the artificiality, artistry and fictitiousness of this fear. In contrast, Dickensian fear is produced through methods which are entirely different from Gothic literature’s devices. In Dickens’s Christmas stories
of the 1840s, as well as in the Bible, terror is connected with the declaration of the supreme truth, which effects absolutely everyone. If in Gothic literature the sense of terror appears in the herovictim or reader due to dependence on the inexplicability of dark forces and rational explanation of evil’s sources, Dickens in his Christmas stories of 1840s proposes an easy way to overcome evil and clearly shows where this evil is rooted: not in uncanny world, but in the soul of human beings.
Unlike the Gothic authors, who shocked the readers through plot, the unexpected turns of passages, the extension of weirdness, dictatorship and the effect of misguided expectancy, Dickens goes the other way and changes the meaning of the fear’s source. The response in the soul of the readers evokes not the external attributes of frightening or scaring suddenness, not the villainy of malignant characters and not the fatal doom or victim’s sufferings. The reader’s empathy and
compassion passes through the prism of the wrongheaded character’s attitude. A climax of feelings is reached at the moment when personage is grasping his sinfulness and mistakes. In that moment, the sinner begins to suffer because he realises he has become the source of other people’s pains.