88 pages • 2 hours read
Charles DickensA Christmas Carol
Fiction | Novella | Middle Grade | Published in 1843A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Stave I: Marley’s Ghost”
The omniscient narrator informs us that Jacob Marley is dead. He died seven years ago on Christmas Eve, and Scrooge himself saw his business partner buried.
It is now Christmas Eve once more, and the streets of London are wrapped in an icy fog. People and carriages passing on the street outside the window are obscured like wraiths or ghosts, and sound is muffled. Scrooge is working at his counting house while keeping a gimlet eye on his clerk, Bob Cratchit. Scrooge’s nephew, Fred, breezes into the office, wishing Scrooge a merry Christmas. Scrooge dismisses him contemptuously with the pronouncement that Christmas has never done anybody any good or put money in anybody’s pocket. Fred protests that many things have done him good that haven’t made him wealthier, and Christmas is one of them. Fred invites Scrooge to Christmas dinner, but Scrooge refuses and dismisses him.
Next, two gentlemen enter the office, taking up contributions to provide food and warmth for the poor. Scrooge refuses to contribute, claiming that prisons and workhouses are sufficient to provide for the needs of the “idle.” The gentlemen argue that those institutions are degrading and inadequate and that many people would rather die than use them. Scrooge responds that in that case they should die, adding that he does not know that what the gentlemen say is true.
The fog becomes thicker and colder. At the office door, a boy begins to sing a carol, but Scrooge drives him off. At the end of the day, Scrooge grumbles to his clerk that he supposes Bob will want to take Christmas Day off and that he supposes Bob would feel ill-used if Scrooge were to dock his pay.
Bob returns home to his loving family, stopping on the way only to play with several little boys who are skating on an icy patch in the street. Scrooge goes back to his own cold and empty house. Approaching his door, he is startled to see that his door knocker has transformed into the face of his old partner, Marley. A moment later, it turns back into a door knocker, and Scrooge tells himself he imagined it. He climbs the wide stairway toward his rooms, but he has gone only halfway when a spectral locomotive hearse (a train car dedicated to transporting coffins) rushes by him.
Unnerved, Scrooge settles down in front of his meager fire and makes himself a bowl of warm gruel as a treatment for a head cold he has developed. The ringing of a bell interrupts his contemplations, and Jacob Marley’s ghost appears, wearing a chain of “cash-boxes, padlocks, keys, deeds, ledgers, and heavy purses” (10). Once Marley has convinced Scrooge that Scrooge is not imagining him, Marley says his spirit has been roaming the Earth as punishment for not making it his business to care for his fellow beings. He has come to warn that Scrooge will share his fate unless he changes his ways. To that end, Marley has arranged for Scrooge to have one chance to change.
He tells Scrooge that three spirits will visit him, one each night, over the following three days. Scrooge stammers that he would rather they didn’t. Marley tells Scrooge he would be wise to heed what the spirits show him. Marley must then return to his hopeless wandering. Looking out the window after him, Scrooge sees the sky full of spirits bewailing their inability to ease the suffering of the living.
Chapter 1 Analysis
As in many of Dickens’s novels, the narrator of A Christmas Carol has a distinctive voice and an important role in shaping readers’ experiences. The opening lines’ hyperbolic insistence on Jacob Marley’s death work to surprise the reader; the use of humor establishes a rapport between reader and narrator. The narrator also takes time to paint a richly detailed picture of the environment both inside and outside the office, using setting to set the emotional tone of the story. The fog is icy. Scrooge freezes everything around him. The darkness and fog create a sense of otherworldly isolation; characters manifest one at a time, then disappear again. The tenor of the ice and fog changes somewhat when Bob leaves the office—he runs and plays, the ice becoming a source of fun—but tor Scrooge, the night only becomes colder and lonelier.
The spectral imagery of the opening pages is not the only way Dickens lays the groundwork for Scrooge’s impending spiritual journey. Scrooge’s nephew Fred, the two philanthropic gentlemen, and the hearse foreshadow the three spirits Scrooge will encounter. Fred represents the past through his connection with Scrooge’s sister; the gentlemen represent the immediate needs of the suffering poor; the hearse represents Scrooge’s future, which is death.
Marley’s face appearing as the doorknocker acts as a herald; once Scrooge has crossed the door’s threshold, he has entered the special world of the story, and there is no going back. Symbolically, Scrooge has entered the realm of death: The door bore the face of his deceased partner, he sees a locomotive hearse pass him on the stairs (the train car may be how Marley transports himself from the front door to Scrooge’s apartments), and when he reaches his rooms, Marley’s ghost finds him there. Marley himself is the archetypal herald who delivers the “call to adventure.” Typically, the herald signals the appearance of an incident or individual who will set the protagonist on his adventure, which in Scrooge’s case is primarily a psychological journey. Death, in this case, doesn’t refer strictly to (literal or figurative) dissolution. Death’s realm is also a place of transformation (or resurrection, in line with the book’s loosely Christian framework).
Once Marley has succeeded in convincing Scrooge that he is face to face with an actual ghost, he announces the forthcoming appearance of the three spirits. At this point, Scrooge refuses the call to adventure. Typically, refusing the call is an indication that the hero is not looking for trouble. Scrooge, however, is an antihero—a protagonist with pronounced negative traits such as greed, selfishness, indifference to others’ suffering, etc. In this case, refusing the call is a sign of weakness rather than an indication of peaceable nature. Eventually, Scrooge has no choice but to reconcile himself to the inevitability of the visitations.
The most prominent theme of the story is the relationship between greed, poverty, and capitalism. Dickens saw the problems of extreme economic stratification not as an outgrowth of capitalism per se but as a consequence of individual greed and selfishness. It is therefore the individual, not the state, that is responsible for the welfare of those in need. As Marley says, “[M]ankind was my business” (14). The state response to poverty—prisons and poorhouses—was so demeaning that, as the benevolent gentleman said, “many would rather die” than resort to them (6). When Scrooge replies that he does not know (believe) that to be true, he is proudly proclaiming his ignorance, which is significant in light of a scene at the end of Stave 3, where the Ghost of Christmas Present will proclaim that ignorance is the “doom” of humanity.
Time is a significant motif throughout the story—most obviously via the Ghosts of Christmases Past, Present and Future, but Scrooge also seems haunted by clocks and bells: “The ancient tower of a church, whose gruff old bell was always peeping slyly down at Scrooge out of a Gothic window in the wall, became invisible, and struck the hours and quarters in the clouds” (6). Among other things, this imagery is a reminder of human mortality and the finite amount of time Scrooge has to change his ways.
Related Titles
By Charles Dickens
