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Chapter 2
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Small Things Like These, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Subjugation of Women and Girls
Religious Hypocrisy and Abuse of Power
Complicity
Humanity vs. Selfishness
Summary
Analysis
Christmas draws nearer. A nativity scene has been set up on the town square. Traditionally, the people of New Ross gather outside the Town Hall on the first Sunday of December to see the Christmas lights go on. Furlong and has family join in on the festivities. His daughters join the carol singers, and Furlong is pleased to see them accepted alongside the other children. A man dressed as Santa walks down the street, and Furlong’s young daughter Loretta cries out in fear. Furlong consoles her, but inwardly he worries that she might not be brave enough to face the harsh world.
Again, Furlong’s pride at seeing his daughters sing among the carolers reinforces how much he cares about the town’s acceptance of his family. Even if no one has shown him any blatant animosity, one gets the sense that Furlong is perpetually on thin ice around town and that one misstep on his or a family member’s part could send everything he’s worked so hard to achieve crumbling to the floor. His fear for Loretta reinforces the uneven footing.
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At home that evening, Eileen and the girls get to work baking the Christmas cake. Later, the girls write their letters to Santa. Inwardly, Furlong considers how hurried their lives are. Always, they are thinking about the next task that needs to be done. His thoughts drift back to one Christmas of his childhood. He had asked Santa to bring him either his father or a jigsaw puzzle of a farm. When he entered the drawing room, he found three wrapped parcels for him, from Mrs. Wilson and Ned. The parcels contained a nailbrush and a bar of soap, a hot water bottle, and a book—Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. After opening them, Furlong ran outside to hide his disappointment and his tears.
It seems that Furlong feels alienated even from his own family. Although it’s clear that he loves his wife and daughters and that they reciprocate that love, he still struggles to connect with them in daily life, becoming lost in his thoughts as they busy themselves with baking and other chores. This scene also hints at the rigid gender roles that govern life in New Ross—women and girls, it seems, are responsible for conventionally feminine domestic tasks, like baking. Furlong’s childhood memory serves to reinforce the scarcity, loneliness, and disappointment that defined his early years. The gift of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is symbolically significant, as it explores themes of mercy, generosity, and compassion for one’s fellow humans—all of which are also at play in Small Things like These.
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Literary Devices
Now, Furlong wonders where his father is. He often looks at the faces of grown men, trying to find some resemblance to himself. One night not long after he married Eileen, he paid Mrs. Wilson a visit, intending to ask her if she knew who his father was. But he worried she’d find the question insulting after all she’d done for him, and he couldn’t summon the courage to ask. Not long afterward, Mrs. Wilson had a stroke and was admitted to the hospital. Furlong went to visit her, and although she could recognize him, she was no longer able to speak.
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In the present, Furlong’s daughter Sheila interrupts his thoughts when she rather “eerily” asks Furlong if Santa ever visited him when he was young. Furlong says yes, and that he brought him a jigsaw puzzle of a farm. Although the next day is a school day, the girls are allowed to stay up late. The girls finish their letters to Santa and put them in the mail. Then the family sits around the fire and toasts slabs of bread, which they slather with Marmite and lemon curd. Furlong feels happy but also anxious, a part of him wondering if there might never be a night as good as this one again.
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At 11:00, Eileen sends the girls to bed. Furlong boils water for tea and thinks about the hot water bottle Ned gave him for Christmas all those years ago, and of A Christmas Carol, which was from Mrs. Wilson. Though he’d been disappointed by the gift, he also found it comforting. He went along with Mrs. Wilson’s advice that he work through the book despite its difficulty, turning to a dictionary to look up words he didn’t know. She thought it was important to have a strong vocabulary. When he won first prize for spelling the next year, she proudly declared, “You’re a credit to yourself.”
After the girls have gone to sleep, Furlong and Eileen carefully open the letters to Santa. Eileen reads the letters and comments admirably on the “bit of manners” the girls have shown, “not asking for the sun and the stars.” Furlong says it’s mostly Eileen who’s responsible for how well the girls have turned out. Eileen replies that Furlong has done well to support the family. The couple decides on what to buy the girls based on what they’ve asked for in the letters. Then they each ask what the other might want for a gift. Furlong comments on the leather shoes he noticed Eileen eyeing in a shop window earlier that day. She praises him for noticing. Furlong himself suggests he might want a book—David Copperfield, perhaps, which he has never read. Or maybe a big dictionary to keep in the house, for the girls.
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After a pause, Eileen asks Furlong if anything is the matter—he’s seemed so distant tonight. Furlong envies Eileen’s calm—doesn’t she ever worry? Eileen, confused, asks if Furlong is talking about money—she thought they were in good shape this year, even if things are tough. Furlong tells Eileen he’s not sure what he’s worried about and to forget about it—maybe he’s just a bit off tonight. Inwardly, though, he asks, “What was it all for? […] The work and the constant worry.” His thoughts drift back to a job he’d taken at a mushroom factory one summer when he was home from technical school. After a long, hard day of work, he looked down the line and saw new mushrooms already sprouting from the compost, and his mood fell as he thought about having to do all that work over again tomorrow.
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For a moment, Furlong feels “a strong, foolish need” to talk about the memory with Eileen, but he thinks better of it. Instead, he listens as she tells him of the gossip she gleaned at the Square that day: about the middle-aged undertaker engaged to the young waitress half his age and about the barber’s son, who has been diagnosed with a rare cancer and only has a year left to live. Inwardly, Furlong wonders whether Eileen is happy with him and if she ever thinks she might be better off if she’d married someone else. He hears a lump of anthracite collapse in the cooker and adds more. Eileen takes the Christmas cake out of the oven and happily announces that the fruit hasn’t fallen to the bottom of the tin.
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