A Christmas Carol is an 1843 novella by Charles Dickens in which the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge is visited on Christmas Eve by the ghost of Jacob Marley and three spirits, of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come. Forced to confront his cold past, the suffering around him and his lonely death, Scrooge wakes transformed into a generous man. It is a moral fable about redemption, social responsibility and the possibility of change, structured in five staves and aligned to the AQA, Edexcel, OCR and Eduqas GCSE specifications.
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by Charles Dickens - published 19 December 1843 (Chapman & Hall)
A Christmas Carol asks whether a hard, selfish man can genuinely change, and Dickens answers that he can, so long as he is made to look honestly at what his choices have cost other people. Over a single Christmas Eve night, three spirits take the miser Ebenezer Scrooge through his own past, the poverty going on in the houses around him, and the lonely death waiting for him if nothing changes. It is one of the most influential works in English literature, and it helped shape the way Christmas is celebrated today.
Quick Info
Plot Summary
Main Characters
Key Themes
Historical Context
Key Quotations
A Christmas Carol: frequently asked questions
What is A Christmas Carol about?
A Christmas Carol is an 1843 novella by Charles Dickens. On Christmas Eve the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by the ghost of his dead partner Jacob Marley and then by three spirits, of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come, who force him to confront his past, the suffering around him and his lonely death. Scrooge wakes transformed, becoming generous and kind. It is a moral fable about redemption and social responsibility.
What are the main themes in A Christmas Carol?
The key themes are redemption and transformation, poverty and social injustice, family and togetherness, and greed versus generosity. Dickens argues that no one is beyond change and that everyone owes a duty to others, dramatised through Scrooge’s journey from isolation to charity and through the contrast between his wealth and the Cratchits’ loving poverty.
What is the most important quotation in A Christmas Carol?
Marley’s cry that "Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business" is the novella’s thesis. Marley redefines "business" from commerce to compassion, warning Scrooge that every person’s true duty is the welfare of others. The chain he "forged in life" makes that neglected duty a literal, crushing weight, the central image of the book.
How does Dickens use the character of Scrooge?
Scrooge is the protagonist and Dickens’s vehicle for the argument that anyone can change. He begins as "a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner", defined entirely by greed, and ends as "as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew". His complete transformation models the generosity Dickens wanted wealthy Victorian readers to adopt.
Why did Dickens write A Christmas Carol, and what is its context?
Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in 1843 in response to the extreme poverty of industrial Britain and the harsh 1834 Poor Law, which forced the destitute into workhouses. Having worked in a blacking factory as a child when his father was imprisoned for debt, he felt a lifelong fury at the neglect of the poor. The allegorical children Ignorance and Want carry this social message most directly.
How do I write a grade 9 essay on A Christmas Carol?
Argue a clear thesis about Dickens’s purpose, then analyse his methods (AO2): the accumulation of adjectives describing Scrooge, the chain as an extended metaphor, pathetic fallacy in the cold imagery, and the structure of the five staves as a moral education. Embed short quotations, link each to Dickens’s social message, and weave in 1840s context (AO3) only where it deepens meaning.
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (1843) is in the public domain. Quotations are reproduced freely as the text is no longer subject to copyright.
See it unfold
The shape of the whole text, each key moment in turn, and how the people in it connect.
Tension arc
How tension rises and falls. Select a point to open that moment.
Tension is a reading of the text, not a fact about it: use it for the shape, and argue with it.
Key moments
“the clerk's fire was so very much smaller that it looked like one coal.”
Moment 1 of 17 · Stave I, the counting-house
Christmas Eve at the counting-house
Setting: Scrooge's counting-house in London, on a dark, foggy afternoonTension
On a foggy Christmas Eve, Scrooge works in his cold counting-house while his clerk, Bob Cratchit, tries to warm himself at a candle. Scrooge's nephew Fred calls to wish him a merry Christmas and invite him to dinner, and Scrooge dismisses Christmas as humbug and refuses.
“keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine”
Who
ESEbenezer Scrooge
FFred
BCBob Cratchit
Why it matters
It sets up the man who must change: every refusal here, of family, of warmth and of Christmas itself, is reversed in Stave V.
Christmas Spirit and GenerosityFamily and Isolation
Stave I, the counting-house: Christmas Eve at the counting-house. On a foggy Christmas Eve, Scrooge works in his cold counting-house while his clerk, Bob Cratchit, tries to warm himself at a candle. Scrooge's nephew Fred calls to wish him a merry Christmas and invite him to dinner, and Scrooge dismisses Christmas as humbug and refuses. "keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine" It sets up the man who must change: every refusal here, of family, of warmth and of Christmas itself, is reversed in Stave V.
Stave I, the charity collectors: The charity collectors. Two portly gentlemen ask Scrooge to give to a fund that will buy the poor food and warmth at Christmas. He asks whether the prisons and the Union workhouses are still working, gives nothing, and says that those who would rather die than go to them had better do so. "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population" Scrooge speaks the hard-line thinking about the poor that Dickens set out to expose, and in Stave III the Ghost of Christmas Present quotes his own words back at him, “he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population”, about Tiny Tim.
Stave I, Marley's Ghost: Marley's Ghost. That night Scrooge sees Marley's face in his door knocker, then hears every bell in the house ring and a chain dragging up the stairs. The ghost of his partner, dead seven years that very night, appears wrapped in a chain of cash-boxes, ledgers and purses, and warns him that three Spirits will come. "I wear the chain I forged in life" Marley shows Scrooge the fate he is building for himself, and offers him a chance and hope of escaping it, which starts the whole story of redemption.
Stave II, the school: The lonely schoolboy. The Ghost of Christmas Past, a strange figure both childlike and old with light springing from its head, takes Scrooge to the countryside where he grew up. The Ghost tells him that one child is still left at his old school, and Scrooge weeps to see his younger self reading alone. At a later Christmas his little sister Fan arrives to take him home. "A solitary child, neglected by his friends, is left there still." Scrooge's tears show that the feeling he has buried is still alive, and suggest that his loneliness began long before his greed.
Stave II, Fezziwig's warehouse: Fezziwig's ball. Scrooge sees himself as a young apprentice to old Fezziwig, who calls a halt to work at seven o'clock on Christmas Eve and turns the warehouse into a ballroom for his workers and neighbours. When the Ghost says the party cost only a few pounds, Scrooge defends his old master, speaking like his younger self. "The happiness he gives, is quite as great as if it cost a fortune." Fezziwig is the employer Scrooge could have been, and Scrooge's sudden wish to say a word or two to his clerk shows the change reaching the way he treats the man who works for him.
Stave II, the broken engagement: Belle releases him. Scrooge, now in the prime of life, sits beside a young woman in a mourning-dress, named as Belle in the next vision. She tells him that another idol, a golden one, has taken her place, and releases him from their engagement because he is no longer the man she agreed to marry. "Another idol has displaced me" The moment Scrooge chose money over love, shown as a choice he made rather than a fate that happened to him.
Stave II, Belle's home: One shadow more. The Ghost forces Scrooge to watch Belle years later, a mother in a noisy, happy home at Christmas. Her husband mentions seeing Scrooge sitting alone in his office while his partner lay dying. Scrooge begs to be taken away, wrestles with the Spirit and presses its extinguisher-cap down on it, but cannot hide its light. "Leave me! Take me back. Haunt me no longer!" Scrooge sees the family life he gave up, and his attempt to put out the Spirit's light shows how painful the truth about his past has become.
Stave III, the Cratchits' house: The Cratchits keep Christmas. The Ghost of Christmas Present, a jolly giant in a green robe, takes Scrooge through the Christmas streets to Bob Cratchit's four-roomed house. The poor family make a feast of a modest goose and pudding, and Tiny Tim, who has a little crutch and limbs supported by an iron frame, sits by his father's side. "God bless us every one!" The Cratchits are poor but grateful and loving, the direct opposite of the rich and lonely Scrooge.
Stave III, the Cratchits' house: A vacant seat. Scrooge, with an interest he has never felt before, asks whether Tiny Tim will live. The Ghost foresees an empty seat and a crutch without an owner, then quotes Scrooge's words about the surplus population back at him, and Mrs Cratchit drinks to Scrooge only for Bob's sake and the day's. "If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, the child will die." The faceless poor of Stave I become one child Scrooge cares about, and his own words are made to sound as cruel as they are.
Stave III, Fred's house: Fred's party. After watching miners, lighthouse keepers and sailors keep Christmas, Scrooge is taken to his nephew's party. Fred laughs at his uncle but pities him and means to invite him every year, and in a game of Yes and No the answer turns out to be Scrooge himself. "I mean to give him the same chance every year, whether he likes it or not, for I pity him." Fred keeps a door open for his uncle, and Scrooge, shouting out guesses nobody can hear, shows how much he wants to belong.
Stave III, an open place near midnight: Ignorance and Want. The Ghost, grown old by the end of its one-day life, brings two wretched children out from the folds of its robe. It names the boy Ignorance and the girl Want, warns Scrooge to beware them both, and answers his plea for them with his own questions about prisons and workhouses. "This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want." Dickens's most direct warning to his readers: the Spirit says to beware most of all the boy, Ignorance, because Doom is written on his brow unless the writing is erased.
Stave IV, the Exchange and old Joe's shop: The dead man's belongings. The silent Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shows Scrooge businessmen joking about a death and a cheap funeral. In a filthy shop in a notorious part of town, a charwoman, a laundress and an undertaker's man sell the dead man's things to old Joe, even the curtains from around his bed, and the charwoman laughs that a man who drove everyone away in life has left them free to profit from his death. "He frightened every one away from him when he was alive, to profit us when he was dead!" A life spent grasping ends with others grasping at what is left, and nobody mourns: Scrooge begins to see that the case of this unhappy man might be his own.
Stave IV, the dark room: The body on the bed. Scrooge stands beside the covered body of the dead man in a dark, plundered room, but has no power to lift the cover from its face. When he asks to see anyone who feels emotion at the death, he is shown a husband and wife in debt who are relieved that their merciless creditor is gone. "unwatched, unwept, uncared for" The only feeling the death causes is pleasure, the final judgement on a life lived without kindness.
Stave IV, the Cratchits' house: The Cratchits mourn Tiny Tim. Asking to see some tenderness connected with a death, Scrooge is taken to the Cratchits, who are hushed with grief. Bob comes home from the green place he promised Tim he would walk to on a Sunday, breaks down, and then tells the family how kindly Scrooge's nephew spoke to him. "My little, little child!" The death the Ghost of Christmas Present foresaw has happened, and the loving family shows what the lonely dead man never had.
Stave IV, the churchyard: The gravestone. The Spirit leads Scrooge past his old office, where another man now sits, to a neglected churchyard, and points to a grave. Scrooge reads his own name on the stone, falls to his knees, and begs to be told that he may still change these shadows by an altered life. "I am not the man I was." The climax: the dead man was Scrooge, and his vow to honour Christmas all the year is made at the very edge of his own grave.
Stave V, Christmas morning: Christmas morning. Scrooge wakes in his own bed on Christmas Day, laughing and crying at once. He sends a prize turkey to the Cratchits without saying who sent it, promises a large gift to the charity collector he turned away, and goes to dinner at Fred's house, where he is welcomed at once. "I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future!" Every refusal of Stave I is undone in a single day, and the joy of it is part of Dickens's argument that change is worth making.
Stave V, the office: A raise for Bob. The next morning Scrooge pretends to be angry when Bob arrives eighteen and a half minutes late, then tells him he is going to raise his salary and help his struggling family. He becomes a second father to Tiny Tim, who does not die. "I am about to raise your salary!" The change reaches the place where Scrooge did most harm, his treatment of the man who works for him, and saves the child whose death was foreseen.
Character map
Select a person to see their relationships. Rings mark who is in the moment above.
Ebenezer Scrooge · business partners · Jacob Marley
In life they were “two kindred spirits” in meanness. In death Marley becomes the one friend who acts for Scrooge's good, procuring the visits that give him a chance and hope of escape.
Ebenezer Scrooge · master and clerk · Bob Cratchit
Scrooge keeps the coal-box in his own room and grudges Bob his day off. In Stave V he raises his salary and tells him to buy another coal-scuttle.
Ebenezer Scrooge · uncle and nephew · Fred
Refused in Stave I, Fred pities and defends his uncle in Stave III, then welcomes him to dinner in Stave V without a word of reproach.
Fan · mother and son · Fred
When the Ghost of Christmas Past says Fan had children, Scrooge corrects it: “One child”. “Your nephew”, the Ghost answers, so the nephew Scrooge turns away is his living link to the sister who once came to take him home.
Ebenezer Scrooge · brother and sister · Fan
Fan comes to fetch the lonely schoolboy home for Christmas. The Ghost calls her a delicate creature, but says “she had a large heart”. She died a woman, leaving one child, and one reading is that her warmth lives on in her son.
Ebenezer Scrooge · engaged, then parted · Belle
Belle releases Scrooge because Gain has become his master-passion. The later vision of her happy family shows him exactly what he gave up.
Ebenezer Scrooge · apprentice and master · Fezziwig
Fezziwig shows that an employer can make work “a pleasure or a toil” with small kindnesses, as Scrooge himself puts it in Stave II. That is the standard by which Scrooge's treatment of Bob is judged.
Bob Cratchit · father and son · Tiny Tim
Bob carries Tim home from church on his shoulder and holds his hand by the fire. His grief in Stave IV is the novella's deepest sorrow, and Tim's survival its happiest outcome.
Bob Cratchit · husband and wife · Mrs Cratchit
Mrs Cratchit calls Scrooge “an odious, stingy, hard, unfeeling man” but drinks his health for Bob's sake and the day's, showing both her anger and her loyalty.
Ebenezer Scrooge · strangers, then second father · Tiny Tim
Scrooge asks the Spirit to “tell me if Tiny Tim will live” with what the narrator calls “an interest he had never felt before”: the poor he dismissed in Stave I now have a name and a face. By the end, the narrator says, he was a second father to him.
Ghost of Christmas Past · guide through memory · Ebenezer Scrooge
Gentle but relentless, it makes Scrooge weep for his younger self and forces him to watch what he lost. He tries to put out its light and cannot.
Ghost of Christmas Present · guide through the present · Ebenezer Scrooge
Warm and generous, it teaches Scrooge through what he sees, then turns his own words about the poor back on him.
Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come · silent guide to the future · Ebenezer Scrooge
It never speaks. Its pointing hand leads Scrooge to his own grave, and it trembles only when he begs for the chance to change.
Ghost of Christmas Present · hidden beneath its robe · Ignorance and Want
The Spirit says the children are Man's, and that they cling to the Spirit itself, “appealing from their fathers”: the neglected children of society, hidden under the robe of Christmas plenty.
Fred · near strangers · Bob Cratchit
In Stave IV Fred, who has scarcely met Bob, stops him in the street to offer help after Tim's death: kindness that asks for nothing in return.
The charity collectors · refused, then repaid · Ebenezer Scrooge
Scrooge sends them away with nothing in Stave I. In Stave V he finds one of them in the street and whispers a gift that includes “a great many back-payments”.
Characters as described
Each portrait is drawn from the words of the text, not from a film or a stage production. The numbers on the picture point to those words.
Ebenezer Scrooge
The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose1, shrivelled his cheek2, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red3, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin4.
Stave One
The cold is inside him. Dickens turns Scrooge's meanness into weather, and then into a face.
This print has one colour besides black, so red marks his eyes; his blue lips are left to the words.
Fred
He had so heated himself with rapid walking in the fog and frost, this nephew of Scrooge's, that he was all in a glow1; his face was ruddy and handsome2; his eyes sparkled3, and his breath smoked again4.
Stave One
Everything cold in his uncle is warm in Fred. Scrooge carries his own cold about with him; his nephew comes in out of the fog and frost glowing.
Jacob Marley
The same face: the very same. Marley in his pigtail1, usual waistcoat, tights and boots; the tassels on the latter bristling, like his pigtail, and his coat-skirts, and the hair upon his head. The chain he drew was clasped about his middle2. It was long, and wound about him like a tail; and it was made (for Scrooge observed it closely) of cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel3. His body was transparent; so that Scrooge, observing him, and looking through his waistcoat, could see the two buttons on his coat behind4.
Stave One
Marley wears his business. The chain is made of the things of his trade, and he tells Scrooge he forged it himself in life, link by link.
Dickens says the Ghost is transparent. The print shows it where Scrooge looks: the waistcoat is only a broken outline, and through it you see the back of his coat.
Study guide sections
The rest of the guide, section by section: analysis, vocabulary and exam practice for this text.
Key passages for close reading
Ghost of Christmas Past
Its hair, which hung about its neck and down its back, was white as if with age1; and yet the face had not a wrinkle in it2, and the tenderest bloom was on the skin. The arms were very long and muscular; the hands the same, as if its hold were of uncommon strength. Its legs and feet, most delicately formed, were, like those upper members, bare. It wore a tunic of the purest white; and round its waist was bound a lustrous belt, the sheen of which was beautiful. It held a branch of fresh green holly in its hand3; and, in singular contradiction of that wintry emblem, had its dress trimmed with summer flowers4. But the strangest thing about it was, that from the crown of its head there sprung a bright clear jet of light5, by which all this was visible; and which was doubtless the occasion of its using, in its duller moments, a great extinguisher for a cap6, which it now held under its arm.
Stave Two
Every detail comes in opposites: old and young, winter holly and summer flowers, a light and the cap that can put it out. At the end of the stave Scrooge presses that cap down on it, and still cannot hide the light.
The holly is green in the text; the print has only black and one red, so its leaves are black and the red is kept for the flowers and the bloom on its cheek.
Fezziwig
Old Fezziwig laid down his pen, and looked up at the clock, which pointed to the hour of seven. He rubbed his hands1; adjusted his capacious waistcoat2; laughed all over himself, from his shoes to his organ of benevolence3; and called out in a comfortable, oily, rich, fat, jovial voice4:
Stave Two
Every verb is generous and bodily: rubbed, adjusted, laughed, called. Fezziwig is the kind of master Scrooge could have become, and did not.
His cap is the “Welsh wig” of the paragraph before: a knitted woollen cap, not a wig of hair. The “organ of benevolence” is a phrenologist’s name for the top of the forehead.
Belle
He was not alone, but sat by the side of a fair young girl1 in a mourning-dress2: in whose eyes there were tears3, which sparkled in the light that shone out of the Ghost of Christmas Past4.
Stave Two
Belle is in tears before she says a word. She has come to release Scrooge from their engagement because, in her words, “Another idol has displaced me”.
Ghost of Christmas Present
It was clothed in one simple green robe, or mantle, bordered with white fur1. This garment hung so loosely on the figure, that its capacious breast was bare, as if disdaining to be warded or concealed by any artifice. Its feet, observable beneath the ample folds of the garment, were also bare; and on its head it wore no other covering than a holly wreath, set here and there with shining icicles2. Its dark brown curls were long and free3; free as its genial face, its sparkling eye4, its open hand5, its cheery voice, its unconstrained demeanour, and its joyful air. Girded round its middle was an antique scabbard; but no sword was in it6, and the ancient sheath was eaten up with rust.
Stave Three
Nothing about this Spirit is hidden or held back: bare breast, bare feet, open hand. Even its scabbard is empty and rusted; it brings plenty and peace, not a sword.
The torch comes from the paragraph before: “a glowing torch, in shape not unlike Plenty’s horn”. The robe is green and the curls dark brown in the text; the print has only black and one red, so the red is kept for the torch’s glow and the rust.
Bob Cratchit
So Martha hid herself, and in came little Bob, the father1, with at least three feet of comforter exclusive of the fringe, hanging down before him2; and his threadbare clothes darned up and brushed3, to look seasonable; and Tiny Tim upon his shoulder4.
Stave Three
Bob is poor and makes the best of it: his clothes are mended and brushed for the day. Dickens hardly describes him at all; we know him by what he wears and whom he carries.
Tiny Tim
Alas for Tiny Tim, he bore a little crutch1, and had his limbs supported by an iron frame2!
Stave Three
This one sentence is nearly all Dickens tells us about how Tim looks. The rest of him is his words and his cheerfulness, which is why the Spirit’s warning of “a crutch without an owner” lands so hard.
Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come
It was shrouded in a deep black garment1, which concealed its head, its face2, its form, and left nothing of it visible save one outstretched hand3. But for this it would have been difficult to detach its figure from the night4, and separate it from the darkness by which it was surrounded.
Stave Four
The future cannot be seen, so the Spirit has no face. All Scrooge is given is a hand that points, and he must work out for himself where it is pointing.
where the shadow of the growing tree would fall2
.
He was not alone, but sat by the side of
a fair young girl in a mourning-dress3
: in whose eyes there were tears, which sparkled in the light that shone out of the Ghost of Christmas Past.
“It matters little,” she said, softly. “To you, very little.
Another idol has displaced me4
; and if it can cheer and comfort you in time to come, as I would have tried to do, I have no just cause to grieve.”
“What Idol has displaced you?” he rejoined.
“A golden one.”
“
This is the even-handed dealing of the world!5
” he said. “There is nothing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!”
“You fear the world too much,” she answered, gently. “All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach. I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one by one, until
the master-passion, Gain, engrosses you6
. Have I not?”
“What then?” he retorted. “Even if I have grown so much wiser, what then? I am not changed towards you.”
She shook her head.
“Am I?”
“
Our contract is an old one.7
It was made when we were both poor and content to be so, until, in good season, we could improve our worldly fortune by our patient industry. You are changed. When it was made,
you were another man8
.”
1“the signs of care and avarice” Dickens shows the change happening on the face. Scrooge does not yet have “the harsh and rigid lines of later years”: he is caught halfway to becoming the man of Stave I, which makes the scene painful rather than simply damning. Avarice means greed for wealth.
2“where the shadow of the growing tree would fall” Greed is a tree that has “taken root” and is still growing. The metaphor makes greed a slow, natural process rather than one sudden decision, and the shadow it will cast looks ahead to the dark, cold life of Stave I. A tree that is still growing can still be cut down, which is exactly what the Spirits attempt.
3“a fair young girl in a mourning-dress” Dickens never says whom she is mourning. The literal reading is simply that someone close to her has died. Many readers find the symbolic reading stronger: that she is already grieving for the man Scrooge used to be, and the close of the scene supports it, when she releases him “for the love of him you once were”.
4“Another idol has displaced me” An idol is a false god, and the worship of idols is forbidden in the Ten Commandments. Belle tells Scrooge, softly and without anger, that he has turned from love to worship something else. “A golden one” completes the metaphor in three words: money has become his religion.
5“This is the even-handed dealing of the world!” Scrooge answers with bitter sarcasm: the world punishes poverty harshly, then condemns people for trying to escape it. The point is not foolish, and Dickens lets it stand. What Belle answers is not the argument but the fear beneath it: “You fear the world too much”.
The question: Starting with this extract, how does Dickens present the effects of greed on Scrooge? Write about how Dickens presents Scrooge and Belle in this extract, and how he presents greed in the novella as a whole.
“the master-passion, Gain, engrosses you” Gain is capitalised and personified as a master that rules him, so Scrooge is no longer free. To engross means to absorb completely, but it once also meant to buy up the whole supply of a commodity, and that business sense suits a man whose feelings have been taken over by trade.
7“Our contract is an old one.” Even their engagement is described in the language of business: a contract, made when they were both poor and meant to improve their fortune by “patient industry”. Belle may be speaking his language on purpose, to show that she understands what he now values.
8“you were another man” Belle's verdict is that Scrooge has become someone else. The phrase comes back in Stave IV, when Scrooge tells the last Spirit that he hopes “to live to be another man from what I was”: the novella turns her judgement into his hope.
5
, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.
Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but
the words choked themselves6
, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.
“
Spirit! are they yours?7
” Scrooge could say no more.
1“wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable” An asyndetic list: five adjectives with no conjunction to slow them down. It moves between pity (wretched, miserable) and horror (frightful, hideous), so the reader feels both at once. It can also be read as an answer to the list in the opening pages of Stave I, “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching”: one list showed what men like Scrooge do, this one shows what their neglect produces.
2“Oh, Man! look here. Look, look, down here!” The Spirit has called Scrooge “Man” before, at the Cratchits, so on one level this is simply addressed to him. But the capital letter comes back a few lines later, when the Spirit says the children belong to Man, and it lets the cry reach past Scrooge to all humanity, and so to every reader. The repeated imperative insists that the comfortable must see what they would rather avoid, and “down here” reminds the reader that the children are kneeling at the Spirit's feet, where anyone who does not choose to look down will miss them.
3“Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish” A second list, this time of how the children look. Wolfish is the most frightening word in it: hunger has made them look like animals, and wolves are dangerous as well as starving. Dickens hints that a society which leaves children like this is breeding its own threat, a warning the Spirit makes plain a few lines later.
4“a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age” The simile makes the children old before their time, as if a withered hand had pinched and twisted them. Shrivelled has appeared before, in Stave I, where the cold within Scrooge “shrivelled his cheek”. One reading is that the same coldness has done both: the miser's meanness is the hand that has withered these children.
5
The question: How does Dickens use language to make the reader respond to the two children in this extract? Refer closely to words and phrases from the extract, and explain the effect of each on the reader.
ghostly eyes intently fixed upon him5
, while he, though he stretched his own to the utmost, could see nothing but a spectral hand and
one great heap of black6
.
“Ghost of the Future!” he exclaimed, “
I fear you more than any spectre I have seen7
. But as I know your purpose is to do me good, and as I hope to live to be another man from what I was, I am prepared to bear you company, and do it with a thankful heart. Will you not speak to me?”
It gave him no reply. The hand was pointed straight before them.
1“slowly, gravely, silently” Three adverbs slow the opening sentence to the Phantom's own pace, so the reader waits as Scrooge waits. Gravely means seriously, but in a stave that leads to a grave it is hard not to hear the grave in it too: whether or not Dickens meant a pun, the word carries death into the first line.
2“left nothing of it visible save one outstretched hand” Hooded, black and faceless, the Phantom resembles the traditional figure of Death. Only the hand can be seen, and the hand is how it communicates: it points, and in the churchyard its finger will point from a grave to Scrooge and back again. One gesture carries the whole of the Spirit's meaning.
3“the Spirit neither spoke nor moved” The earlier visitors all talked, Marley at length. This one never speaks in the whole stave, and the silence is more frightening than any speech because Scrooge must interpret everything himself. The future, Dickens suggests, does not explain itself: it has to be read in the consequences of what we do now.
4“shadows of the things that have not happened, but will happen” Scrooge assumes the future is fixed: these things “will happen”. The stave turns on that assumption. At the grave he asks instead whether they are “shadows of things that May be, only”, and all his hope rests on the second possibility.
5“ghostly eyes intently fixed upon him” Scrooge cannot see the eyes, only feel them. The master who kept his office door open in Stave I “that he might keep his eye upon his clerk” is now the one being watched and judged, unable to look back. The Gothic horror here comes from what is hidden, not from what is shown.
The question: Starting with this extract, explore how Dickens presents fear in A Christmas Carol. Write about how Dickens presents Scrooge's fear of the last Spirit in this extract, and how he uses fear to bring about change in the novella as a whole.
Surplus population
Excess people. The thinking behind it is associated with the economist Thomas Malthus, whose Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) argued that population tends to grow faster than the food to feed it. Scrooge uses it to say the poor are too many; in Stave III the Ghost of Christmas Present throws it back at him.
Union workhouse
Under the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, parishes were grouped into Poor Law Unions, and help for the poor was meant to be given in workhouses where conditions were deliberately made harsher than the life of the poorest labourer outside, so that only the truly destitute would apply.
Poor Law
The laws governing help for the poor. When Scrooge asks whether the Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, he is approving of a system the 1834 Act had made deliberately harsh.
Treadmill
A large wheel with steps that prisoners were made to climb for hours, like walking up an endless staircase, as a punishment. Penal treadmills were introduced in 1818 by the engineer William Cubitt.
Bedlam
The old nickname of the Bethlem hospital in London, which was housing people with mental illness by the early fifteenth century and later became an asylum for them; from it the word bedlam came to mean madness and chaos. Scrooge says he will retire to Bedlam after hearing his clerk, on fifteen shillings a week with a wife and family, “talking about a merry Christmas”: to Scrooge, that is madness.
Comforter
A woollen scarf for winter. Bob Cratchit puts on his white comforter to try to keep warm at his desk, and runs home with its long ends dangling below his waist, because he has no great-coat.
Bob
Slang for a shilling. Dickens jokes that Bob Cratchit takes home fifteen bob a week, “fifteen copies of his Christian name”.
Gruel
A thin, watery porridge, once eaten mainly by the poor and the sick. Scrooge, rich as he is, sits over a tiny fire with a saucepan of gruel because he has a cold.
Fettered
Chained, especially by the legs. Scrooge says “You are fettered” to Marley, who answers that he forged the chain himself, link by link.
Penance
Punishment or suffering undergone to make up for wrongdoing. Marley says that sitting invisible beside Scrooge for many a day is no light part of his penance.
Apprentice
A young person bound to an employer for a set time to learn a trade, shortened to 'prentice in the Fezziwig scene. Scrooge and Dick Wilkins were apprenticed to Fezziwig and slept under a counter in the back-shop.
Negus
A hot drink of wine, often port, mixed with hot water, sugar, spices and oranges or lemons, named after Colonel Francis Negus. It is served at Fezziwig's ball.
Forfeits
A party game in which a player hands over a belonging and must pay a playful penalty to win it back. It is played at Fezziwig's ball and again at Fred's party.
Dowerless
Without a dowry, the money or property a bride brought to her marriage. Belle knows that a man who can “weigh everything by Gain” would not now choose a dowerless girl.
Idol
An image worshipped as a god. Belle tells Scrooge that another idol, a golden one, has taken her place: money has become his false god.
Engross
To take up someone's attention completely. It once also meant to buy up the whole supply of a commodity, a sense worth remembering when Belle says the master-passion, Gain, engrosses Scrooge.
Avarice
Extreme greed for wealth. In the prime of life, Scrooge's face has begun to wear the “signs of care and avarice” in the vision the Ghost of Christmas Past shows him.
Misanthropic
Distrusting or disliking people in general. In Stave I even the frozen overflow from a water-plug turns to misanthropic ice, as if Scrooge's mood had spread to the street.
Twelfth-cake
A rich cake once eaten on Twelfth Night, the end of the twelve days of Christmas, often with a bean and a pea baked inside to choose a king and queen for the night. Twelfth-cakes are part of the heap of food that forms the throne of the Ghost of Christmas Present.
Old Scratch
A nickname for the Devil. When one businessman in Stave IV tells another that “Old Scratch has got his own at last”, he means that the Devil has claimed the dead man as his own.
Charwoman
A woman employed to clean other people's houses, traditionally coming in by the day. In Stave IV the charwoman who stripped the dead man's bed sells his bed-curtains, blankets and shirt to old Joe.
Milliner
A maker or seller of women's hats, and in older use of other women's clothing and trimmings too. Martha Cratchit is a poor apprentice at a milliner's and works long hours at a stretch.
Laocoön
A priest of Troy in the story told in Virgil's Aeneid, shown in a famous ancient statue with his sons, attacked by sea serpents. Scrooge, tangled up in his stockings on Christmas morning, makes a perfect Laocoön of himself.
Smoking bishop
A hot drink of port and red wine warmed with roasted lemons or Seville oranges, sugar and spices such as cloves. Scrooge offers to discuss Bob's affairs over a Christmas bowl of it.
Total Abstinence Principle
The rule of drinking no alcohol at all. It was promoted by the teetotal movement, whose name took hold at the Preston Temperance Society, founded by Joseph Livesey in 1833. The sentence in the last paragraph that uses it can be read as a pun on the two kinds of spirits: from then on, Scrooge had no more to do with ghosts, or with strong drink.
Cant
Empty, hypocritical talk, especially talk that sounds moral. When the Ghost of Christmas Present tells Scrooge to “forbear that wicked cant”, the cant is his talk of the surplus population: a cruel idea dressed up as economic good sense.
Adamant
As a noun, a legendary stone so hard it could not be broken. The Ghost calls Scrooge “Man” and adds “if man you be in heart, not adamant”: a heart of stone, like the flint of Stave I, is the thing he must prove he has not got.
Intercourse
Communication or dealings between people, which was its everyday meaning in Dickens's time. At the grave Scrooge says he will not be the man he must have been “but for this intercourse”, meaning his dealings with the Spirits, and the last paragraph says he had “no further intercourse with Spirits”.
Allegory
A story, or a figure in one, that stands for a hidden moral or political message. The children Ignorance and Want are allegorical figures: they are named after what they represent.
“Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked” Antithesis: angels set against devils. Children should be innocent, almost holy, and Dickens insists that what has made these two devilish is how they have been treated, not what they were born as. It is the novella's argument about the poor in a single sentence: neglect, not birth, makes people dangerous.
6“the words choked themselves” Scrooge tries to be polite and call them fine children, but the words are personified as refusing to take part in a lie. His conscience is now working faster than his manners. Compare the Scrooge of Stave I, who talked about the deaths of the poor without hesitating at all.
7“Spirit! are they yours?” Scrooge's question can be read as a hope that the children are somebody else's responsibility. The Spirit's answer, in the next line, is that they belong to Man, humanity as a whole, and that they cling to the Spirit “appealing from their fathers”. One reading is that, as a case is appealed from a lower court to a higher one, the children appeal over the heads of the fathers who have failed them. The scene refuses the idea that the poor are someone else's business, the same idea Marley's Ghost rejected in Stave I.
6
“one great heap of black” After the abstract nouns of the description so far (“mysterious presence”, “solemn dread”), Dickens ends with five plain words of one syllable. The Spirit is reduced to a shapeless mass, as formless as death and as impossible to argue with.
7“I fear you more than any spectre I have seen” Scrooge admits his fear in plain words. Faced with Marley in Stave I, he joked that the ghost might be “an undigested bit of beef”, which the narrator explains was his way of “keeping down his terror”; now he makes no such pretence. In the same speech he says he knows the Spirit means to do him good and hopes to be another man: fear and hope arrive together, and he now follows willingly.
