Back to: Dickens A Christmas Carol and the Bible
A Christmas Carol
by Charles Dickens
I have endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it.
Their faithful Friend and Servant,
C. D. December, 1843.
Stave 1: Marley’s Ghost
1. Meaning of Scrooge
Dickens is using the meaning of carol familiar’ to him: a song celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ.Dickens extends the concept of his book being a carol by calling each chapter a stave, a stanza of a song.
Origin of Scrooge – When biblical prophets and the patriarchs passed through a trial, they would set up an altar or a stone of remembrance, to remind themselves how God had led and sustained them through their trials. These stones were called Ebenezer (1 Samuel 7:1-2) which scripture define as “the Lord is my help”. These stones were a witness of God’s sustaining power in a believer’s past and His promise in how he would lead them in the future. They were used as a tangible sign of intangible truth that these believers had learned about God’s leading, providence and care
If Christ is the subject of Christmas, the lost are the object of His saving intent
1 Selfishness, greed – The colloquial word Scrooge means “to squeeze” and is used by Dickens to underscore his main character’s primary sin: selfishness, greed—as in the description of Scrooge as “a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner
When Marley makes himself fully present to Scrooge, he appears in locks and chains, symbolizing his self-imprisonment. Scrooge doesn’t realized that he has been himself. Scrooge has just come from three separate encounters—with his nephew, his clerk, and his visitors soliciting for the poor. Each visitor has made a similar request of Scrooge—that he, in effect, open himself up to others, unlock his heart and mind, and free his spirit so that it may encompass the realities of people other than he.
2 Loner – Scrooge is also a “loner,” solitary “as an oyster.” Self- isolating and miserable, he even scares away the dogs in the street and makes miserable nearly everyone around him—like his poor clerk, who must hover over the begrudgingly offered piece of coal to keep his fingers working to keep track of his boss’s accounts.
Scrooge trusts no one, neither God nor man. Because Scrooge does not trust the gentle hand of God’s providence, his hands are clinched tightly around for survival’s sake on his own resources. He thinks that he is his only provider. Because he has to grasp so tightly, he can not open his hand in fellowship to God or man.
3. Lost the ability to love. Scrooge is lawless even though he is not disobeying the letter of the law. Scrooge is under heavy debt even though his economic books show a substantial margin of profit. Scrooge’s discourtesy makes him lawless. He shuns human contact as an ashamed debtor might avoid bill collectors. He has lost all courtesy because he has lost the ability to love. He does not treat others as if they are created in God’s image because he no longer views himself created in God’s image. As he perceives himself as “master of his own domain” he doesn’t invest his life as a stewardship from God.]]
Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge’s name was good upon ‘Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to.
Marley was dead – 4 times for the 4 ghosts. 7 times in book – completeness. The repetition serves to highlight the death from which Marley makes his miraculous reappearance
Scrooge has to begun his redemption journey by being forced to look up from his world of temporary shortsighted attitudes and perceptions of his world. Christmas forces us to look up and out into our world
Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
Scrooge knew he was dead? Of course he did. How could it be otherwise? Scrooge and he were partners for I don’t know how many years. Scrooge was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend, and sole mourner. And even Scrooge was not so dreadfully cut up by the sad event, but that he was an excellent man of business on the very day of the funeral, and solemnised it with an undoubted bargain. The mention of Marley’s funeral brings me back to the point I started from. There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate. If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet’s Father died before the play began, there would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts, than there would be in any other middle-aged gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy spot — say Saint Paul’s Churchyard for instance — literally to astonish his son’s weak mind.
Scrooge never painted out Old Marley’s name. There it stood, years afterwards, above the warehouse door: Scrooge and Marley. The firm was known as Scrooge and Marley. Sometimes people new to the business called Scrooge Scrooge, and sometimes Marley, but he answered to both names. It was all the same to him.
Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grind- stone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, 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 chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dogdays; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas.
2. Use of Sinner
Dickens’s use of “sinner” reflects the Christian context of his story You cannot have sin without God to decree sin. Men deal with crime and criminals. God deals with sin and sinners. God cannot reign in a proud heart because the proud reign for themselves and have no need for any God. Most important of all, humanity will never humble themselves before their almighty God until they let go of false idols
External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty. Foul weather didn’t know where to have him. The heaviest rain, and snow, and hail, and sleet, could boast of the advantage over him in only one respect. They often ‘came down’ handsomely, and Scrooge never did.
Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with gladsome looks, ‘My dear Scrooge, how are you? When will you come to see me?’ No beggars implored him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him what it was o’clock, no man or woman ever once in all his life inquired the way to such and such a place, of Scrooge. Even the blind men’s dogs appeared to know him; and when they saw him coming on, would tug their owners into doorways and up courts; and then would wag their tails as though they said, ‘No eye at all is better than an evil eye, dark master!’
But what did Scrooge care! It was the very thing he liked. To edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance, was what the knowing ones call ‘nuts’ to Scrooge.
Once upon a time — of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve — old Scrooge sat busy in his counting-house. It was cold, bleak, biting weather: foggy withal: and he could hear the people in the court outside, go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their breasts, and stamping their feet upon the pavement stones to warm them. The city clocks had only just gone three, but it was quite dark already — it had not been light all day — and candles were flaring in the windows of the neighbouring offices, like ruddy smears upon the palpable brown air. The fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was so dense without, that although the court was of the narrowest, the houses opposite were mere phantoms. To see the dingy cloud come drooping down, obscuring everything, one might have thought that Nature lived hard by, and was brewing on a large scale.
The door of Scrooge’s counting-house was open that he might keep his eye upon his clerk, who in a dismal little cell beyond, a sort of tank, was copying letters. Scrooge had a very small fire, but the clerk’s fire was so very much smaller that it looked like one coal. But he couldn’t replenish it, for Scrooge kept the coal-box in his own room; and so surely as the clerk came in with the shovel, the master predicted that it would be necessary for them to part. Wherefore the clerk put on his white comforter, and tried to warm himself at the candle; in which effort, not being a man of a strong imagination, he failed.
‘A merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!’ cried a cheerful voice. It was the voice of Scrooge’s nephew, who came upon him so quickly that this was the first intimation he had of his approach.
‘Bah!’ said Scrooge, ‘Humbug!’
3. Freds Appearance Fred’s appearance
It is the late afternoon of Christmas Eve and, except for the interior of Scrooge’s counting house, a bustling and festive purposefulness prevails on the London streets.
– unable to spread any cheer. Interestingly, although Fred has neither guile nor ill will, he seems to enjoy how effortlessly he can outsmart his uncle’s logic in an exchange about human happiness
A merry Christmas, uncle! God save you Page 10 – “God save you,” as well as the more famous line, “God bless us every one,” could not be spoken on the London stage, so cautious was the Lord Chamberlain’s examiner of plays who checked scripts for blasphemy
Scrooge cannot understand how a person without wealth could be happy, but he has no answer—other than his famous “Bah! Humbug!”—Fred’s suggestion that, by the same logic, his uncle’s wealth should be making him merry
Scrooge having no better answer ready on the spur of the moment, said ‘Bah!’ again; and followed it up with ‘Humbug –Scrooge’s now famous interjection was a common term for nonsense. It seems a familiar response of his in this first stave. However, this will be the last chapter in which we hear him utter it, and by the end of Stave One he can’t even finish the word, indicating change already beginning to occur in his perceptions
Nephew of scrooge but closer to Dickens -Charles Kent, a friend of Dickens, commented, “this description of Scrooge’s Nephew was, quite unconsciously but most accurately, in every word of it, a literal description of Charles Dickens himself
Fred has had a glimpse of life’s larger purposes—a vision of the interconnectedness of the human family that is often obscured by the daily preoccupations of getting and spending but is reestablished each year by the return of Christmas
Dickens philosophy spoken through – Nephew“ – “Carol Philosophy” –
But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round — apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that — as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!’
This powerful speech acknowledges mortality as the central fact of life, meant to govern all human effort and meaning. Its dominant place in the life of every mortal being creates a bond among people that dwarfs in importance any differences— political, ethnic, or cultural—that might appear to divide them. Dickens’s choice of words—“people below them”—may sound unfortunate to contemporary ears but would have been fully appropriate for the highly class-conscious nation that nineteenth- century England was. Even then, Dickens’s characterization of death would have been found by many to be appropriate no matter how a society organizes itself.
We also know that this passage was important to Dickens; in his first public reading of A Christmas Carol, he changed “fellow passengers” to “fellow travelers”—a change that is important to understanding Dickens, because it introduces the notion that free will has a role in choices about our ways of relating to one another
This notion of taking responsibility for one’s direction and purpose in life—and of having free will to take that responsibility— is the foundation for the transformation Scrooge undergoes from being one kind of person to being a different kind of person. In this light, it is useful to note that, while Scrooge’s spiritual conversion will appear to be a process forced upon him, in subtle ways, Dickens makes him a partner in the process, actually helping to bring it on
Similarly, Dickens prepares his readers for the workings of the supernatural by introducing the ghost of Hamlet’s father. The narrator needs a way to underscore not only the fact of Marley’s physical death but also to put his readers into a respectful, even awestruck, state of mind to receive the full import of the story
Come to Christmas dinner – Dickens leaves out the complete phrase, “he would see him [damned or in hell first],” the reader of the day was expected to know it—and thereby understand most explicitly Scrooge’s devilish disposition at the beginning
Marriage –
‘Why did you get married?’ said Scrooge.
‘Because I fell in love.’
‘Because you fell in love!’ growled Scrooge, as if that were the only one thing in the world more ridiculous than a merry Christmas. ‘Good afternoon!’
Scrooge thinks his nephew does not have the money for a family and so should not have married, underlining an emphasis on money over love.
He had so heated himself with rapid walking in the fog and frost, this nephew of Scrooge’s, that he was all in a glow; his face was ruddy and handsome; his eyes sparkled, and his breath smoked again. ‘Christmas a humbug, uncle!’ said Scrooge’s nephew. ‘You don’t mean that, I am sure?’
‘I do,’ said Scrooge. ‘Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry? You’re poor enough.’
‘Come, then,’ returned the nephew gaily. ‘What right have you to be dismal? What reason have you to be morose? You’re rich enough.’
Scrooge having no better answer ready on the spur of the moment, said ‘Bah!’ again; and followed it up with ‘Humbug.’
‘Don’t be cross, uncle!’ said the nephew.
‘What else can I be,’ returned the uncle, ‘when I live in such a world of fools as this? Merry Christmas! Out upon merry Christmas! What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in ’em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will,’ said Scrooge indignantly, ‘every idiot who goes about with “Merry Christmas” on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!’
‘Uncle!’ pleaded the nephew.
‘Nephew!’ returned the uncle sternly, ‘keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine.’
‘Keep it!’ repeated Scrooge’s nephew. ‘But you don’t keep it.’
‘Let me leave it alone, then,’ said Scrooge. ‘Much good may it do you! Much good it has ever done you!’
‘There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,’ returned the nephew. ‘Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round — apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that — as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!’
The clerk in the Tank involuntarily applauded. Becoming immediately sensible of the impropriety, he poked the fire, and extinguished the last frail spark for ever.
‘Let me hear another sound from you,’ said Scrooge, ‘and you’ll keep your Christmas by losing your situation! You’re quite a powerful speaker, sir,’ he added, turning to his nephew. ‘I wonder you don’t go into Parliament.’
‘Don’t be angry, uncle. Come! Dine with us tomorrow.’
Scrooge said that he would see him — yes, indeed he did. He went the whole length of the expression, and said that he would see him in that extremity first.
‘But why?’ cried Scrooge’s nephew. ‘Why?’
‘Why did you get married?’ said Scrooge.
‘Because I fell in love.’
‘Because you fell in love!’ growled Scrooge, as if that were the only one thing in the world more ridiculous than a merry Christmas. ‘Good afternoon!’
‘Nay, uncle, but you never came to see me before that happened. Why give it as a reason for not coming now?’
‘Good afternoon,’ said Scrooge.
‘I want nothing from you; I ask nothing of you; why cannot we be friends?’
‘Good afternoon,’ said Scrooge.
‘I am sorry, with all my heart, to find you so resolute. We have never had any quarrel, to which I have been a party. But I have made the trial in homage to Christmas, and I’ll keep my Christmas humour to the last. So A Merry Christmas, uncle!’
‘Good afternoon,’ said Scrooge.
‘And A Happy New Year!’
‘Good afternoon,’ said Scrooge.
His nephew left the room without an angry word, notwithstanding. He stopped at the outer door to bestow the greetings of the season on the clerk, who cold as he was, was warmer than Scrooge; for he returned them cordially.
‘There’s another fellow,’ muttered Scrooge; who overheard him: ‘my clerk, with fifteen shillings a week, and a wife and family, talking about a merry Christmas. I’ll retire to Bedlam.’
4. Crachit
Cratchit
‘There’s another fellow,’ muttered Scrooge; who overheard him: ‘my clerk, with fifteen shillings a week, and a wife and family, talking about a merry Christmas. I’ll retire to Bedlam.’
“Fifteen shillings a week” was the amount Dickens received as an office boy. While fine for a teenage boy, the pay was much too little for a family man. Scrooge knows it—and yet does nothing about it
A Christmas Carol starring George C. Scott as Scrooge. Opening scene between Fred, his nephew, Bob Cratchit and Scrooge depicted in the above text.