ABSTRACT
Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol envisions the possibility of visiting one’s past and future. We can imagine the ability to select a moment in time when things took a dramatic turn. An Icelander visited by Dickens’s spirit of things past might take her to September 9th, 1993. We would see that a great deal had changed since the Colonial Exhibition and Alþingishátíðin, the festival of memories. Now, with a population of a little over 200,000 people, Iceland is considered an affluent country with low disparities in terms of education and wealth and good general access to healthcare. The buildings would look small compared to many other European cities, most of which were built in the 20th century.
