A Christmas Carol

“Oh! but he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, 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 dog-days; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas.”

The author uses metaphor and hyperbolic (exaggerated) imagery to establish Scrooge’s character. By describing Scrooge’s white hair as a coating of frost (rime), he emphasizes that Scrooge is enclosed in a shell of frozen emotion. He creates a metaphorical zone of low temperature around himself, low temperature being a metaphor for emotional coldness. Scrooge appears old, stiff, and shriveled, but authorities on Dickens’s work estimate his age at no more than 57, implying that his inner chill has aged him prematurely.

“‘Christmas! What’s Christmas-time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, and 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.’”

Scrooge’s fixation on money allows him to see only Christmas’s associated expenses. More than that, he feels hostility toward those who appear to be happy, as if happiness itself is a threat to him. That hostility is the first clue that Scrooge has a crack in his shell: If he were truly indifferent to the joy of the season, nothing other people do would upset him, and nothing the three spirits could do would affect him.

“‘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.’”

This exchange is ironic in that Scrooge implies that wealth is the source of happiness despite his own obvious misery. Scrooge himself never pursued money as a means to happiness—only security. The later depiction of Fred with his wife and friends at their party shows that Fred is by no means poor, but Scrooge’s idea of poverty reflects his own bottomless hunger for money, power, and control. This is why Scrooge, despite his wealth, lives as if he were a pauper himself.

“‘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.’”

The author doesn’t imply that money or the pursuit of wealth is a bad thing—only that it is not a good in and of itself. More than that, the author emphasizes that the focus of the season should be on one’s fellow men and women. He mentions the “sacred name and origin” of the holiday (i.e., Jesus’s birth) as almost a sidenote, placing the real emphasis on human connection. The reference to death lays the groundwork for Scrooge’s coming visions; the implication is that all people are equal in their mortality and that those who do not live in keeping with this premise will ultimately face judgment for it.

“[Prisons and workhouses] cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there.’

‘Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.’

‘If they would rather die,’ said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Besides—excuse me—I don’t know that.’

‘But you might know it,’ observed the gentleman.

‘It’s not my business,’ Scrooge returned. “It’s enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people’s.’”

Dickens initially meant to write a tract on the plight of the lower classes. He abandoned it halfway through and wrote this story instead. The workhouses and debtors’ prisons were Victorian England’s answer to the economic upheaval of industrialization and urbanization, which led to widespread poverty. Those institutions were degrading and miserable by design in order to discourage people from resorting to them. Scrooge’s statement that he doesn’t know (he really means that he doesn’t believe or doesn’t care to learn) that people would rather die than go to workhouses will be echoed at the end of Stave 3, when the Ghost of Christmas Present tells Scrooge that ignorance will be the doom of humankind. This implies that ignoring the conditions suffered by the poor is more than just cruel; it is deadly to society itself.

“‘I wear the chain I forged in life,’ replied the Ghost. ‘I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free-will, and of my own free-will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?’

[…]

Or would you know,’ pursued the Ghost, ‘the weight and length of the strong coil you bear yourself? It was full as heavy and as long as this, seven Christmas-eves ago. You have laboured on it since. It is a ponderous chain!’”

Free will is significant here. Scrooge regards money as a source of security and social approbation. While he thought he was building a shell to protect himself from emotional hurt, he was building a prison around himself, ensuring both current unhappiness and future punishment. The desperate and destitute that he would consign to prisons and workhouses are there against their own wishes. Scrooge, however, has chosen to be a prisoner.

“‘Business!’ cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. ‘Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!’”

Scrooge believes that his purpose in life is to hoard as much money as he can grasp; he conflates the economic meaning of “business” with the broader sense of the word as “purview.” Marley draws attention to this conflation, telling him that generosity and kindness are an absolute obligation. He can’t be forced to do it—humankind has free will—but the consequence of his choice is that he is willfully imprisoning himself. Charity, therefore, is freedom.

“Scrooge, starting up into a half-recumbent attitude, found himself face to face with the unearthly visitor who drew them: as close to it as I am now to you, and I am standing in the spirit at your elbow.”

Sometimes an omniscient narrator is a neutral source of information. In this case, the narrator is an individual literally speaking to the reader. He has a distinct voice and personality and even a sense of humor. His intimacy with the reader creates a sense of trust.

“He was conscious of a thousand odours floating in the air, each one connected with a thousand thoughts, and hopes, and joys, and cares long, long forgotten!”

Smell is the most primitive of the senses and the sense most closely connected with memory and emotion. Invoking the smells of the past, the Ghost of Christmas Past connects Scrooge not just to the sights and sounds of the scenes but to the emotions he felt at the time.

“‘Why, it’s Ali Baba!’ Scrooge exclaimed in ecstasy. ‘It’s dear old honest Ali Baba! Yes, yes, I know. One Christmas-time when yonder solitary child was left here all alone, he did come, for the first time, just like that.’”

There are two significant points here. One is that as a child, Scrooge used stories to comfort himself. He suffered emotional hurts and losses, but he could, if he chose, deal with those feelings without walling himself off from them and from life. The second significant point is that Scrooge has a powerful imagination, which ultimately enables him to empathize with the people the ghosts show to him.

“‘A small matter,’ said the Ghost, ‘to make these silly folks so full of gratitude.’

‘Small!’ echoed Scrooge.

[…]

‘Why! Is it not? He has spent but a few pounds of your mortal money: three or four, perhaps. Is that so much that he deserves this praise?’”

‘It isn’t that, Spirit.’ […] ‘He has the power to render us happy or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome; a pleasure or a toil. Say that his power lies in words and looks; in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to add and count ‘em up: what then? The happiness he gives is quite as great as if it cost a fortune.’"

Here, the Ghost of Christmas Past gently prompts Scrooge to remember that making other people’s lives happier doesn’t threaten the money that he associates with security. He doesn’t have to give up the thing that makes him feel safe in order to be a better influence on the world. Rather than telling this to Scrooge, the ghost makes Scrooge say it aloud himself by echoing Scrooge’s earlier remarks on the frivolousness of Christmas. It is essential that Scrooge’s transformation ultimately come from within.

“‘This is the even-handed dealing of the world!’ [Scrooge] 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,’ [Belle] answered gently.”

Scrooge is being bitterly ironic when he refers to the “even-handed dealing of the world.” In fact, Scrooge is correct, but the situation is the opposite of even-handed: Victorian society blames the poor for their poverty, dismissing them as lazy or degenerate even as it nominally condemns greed. Where Scrooge errs is fearing what the world thinks of him. At the end of Stave 5, the narrator will state that some people laugh at the change in Scrooge but that Scrooge doesn’t care; he has lost his fear as part of his transformation.

“And yet I should have dearly liked, I own, to have touched her lips; to have questioned her, that she might have opened them; to have looked upon the lashes of her downcast eyes, and never raised a blush; to have let loose waves of hair, an inch of which would be a keepsake beyond price: in short, I should have liked, I do confess, to have had the lightest licence of a child, and yet to have been man enough to know its value.”

The narrator represents himself as a material person. The question here is whether the narrator is in fact the author, a representation of the author, or a separate personal together.

“When he thought that such another creature, quite as graceful and as full of promise, might have called him father, and been a spring-time in the haggard winter of his life, his sight grew very dim indeed.”

This is Scrooge’s recognition that he has sacrificed the possibility of fatherhood—which in this story has the implication of manhood, or being a mature human being. Until now, Scrooge has never thought about what he might have lost in pursuing wealth. Scrooge’s own father was not a model to emulate, and Scrooge probably had the impression that children were undesirable. However, Scrooge did have other models of manhood; he might have looked to Fezziwig as a role model, for example. In noting this regret, the passage lays the groundwork for the fatherly role Scrooge will ultimately assume in Tiny Tim’s life.

“Heaped up on the floor, to form a kind of throne, were turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch, that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam. In easy state upon this couch there sat a jolly Giant, glorious to see; who bore a glowing torch, in shape not unlike Plenty’s horn, and held it up, high up, to shed its light on Scrooge as he came peeping round the door

[…]

[The spirit] was clothed in one simple deep green robe, or mantle, bordered with white fur. 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 icicles. Its dark brown curls were long and free; free as its genial face, its sparkling eye, its open hand, its cheery voice, its unconstrained demeanour, and its joyful air.”

The Ghost of Christmas Present’s green robe and the holly wreath identify the spirit as Father Christmas (another father figure), who is in turn a more modern incarnation of Saturn, the Greco-Roman deity associated with food and abundance. The latter’s holiday is Saturnalia, which was traditionally celebrated at midwinter. The spirit’s whole presentation is of openness, generosity, and plenty: His hand is open, his robe bares his chest, his feet are bare, and his hair is loose. This contrasts with Scrooge, whom the novel variously describes as like an oyster in a shell and as someone wrapped in chains. Overall, the scene paints a profoundly sensory picture.

“The poulterers’ shops were still half open, and the fruiterers’ were radiant in their glory. There were great, round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of jolly old gentlemen, lolling at the doors, and tumbling out into the street in their apoplectic opulence. There were ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish Friars, and winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe.”

This is another scene of abundance, generosity, and openness. The author uses personification to convey warmth and even physicality. Chestnuts are “jolly old gentleman.” Spanish onions are fat friars who wink at girls under the mistletoe. Everything emphasizes the importance of the senses and ties those senses to human connection. This is in contrast to Scrooge, who is cold and thin and denies himself physical comforts as much as interpersonal relationships.

“‘You would deprive them of their means of dining every seventh day, often the only day on which they can be said to dine at all,’ said Scrooge; ‘wouldn’t you?’

‘I!’ cried the Spirit.

‘You seek to close these places on the Seventh Day,’ said Scrooge. ‘And it comes to the same thing.’

‘I seek!’ exclaimed the Spirit.

‘Forgive me if I am wrong. It has been done in your name, or at least in that of your family,’ said Scrooge.

‘There are some upon this earth of yours,’ returned the Spirit, ‘who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us, and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.’”

Scrooge thinks he has found a “gotcha” and is trying to get a bit of moral leverage. Most Victorian lower-class households didn’t have ovens. There were already laws in effect that prohibited the baking of bread on Sundays, but it was perfectly legal to fire the ovens, so bakers made a profit by cooking people’s dinners on Sundays. Between 1832 and 1837, Sir Andrew Agnew tried several times to introduce a Sunday Observance Bill that would have closed the bakeries entirely on Sundays in the name of religious observance. The bill would have had no effect on the wealthy but would, as Scrooge says, have deprived the poor of one of their few comforts. Despite Dickens’s dig at Agnew, however, the ghost emphasizes the broader picture that Scrooge misses: What people do in the name of his “family” (i.e., Christianity, or perhaps religion broadly) does not necessarily reflect that family or its teachings.

“Much they saw, and far they went, and many homes they visited, but always with a happy end. The Spirit stood beside sick-beds, and they were cheerful; on foreign lands, and they were close at home; by struggling men, and they were patient in their greater hope; by poverty, and it was rich. In almshouse, hospital, and gaol, in misery’s every refuge, where vain man in his little brief authority had not made fast the door, and barred the Spirit out, he left his blessing, and taught Scrooge his precepts.”

Scrooge chooses to be miserable when he might be merry. The spirit shows him people who at least have some excuse to be miserable and yet choose happiness. In every place he is welcome, the spirit brings joy. The precept he teaches Scrooge is: If the least of these can be wealthy in spirit, what excuse have you to be bitter?

“‘They are Man’s,’ said the Spirit, looking down upon them. ‘And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware of them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!’ cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. ‘Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse! And bide the end!’

‘Have they no refuge or resource?’ cried Scrooge.

‘Are there no prisons?" said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. ‘Are there no workhouses?’”

In Stave 1, Scrooge argues with the benevolent gentlemen about whether many poor people would rather die than go to one of the workhouses. In other words, he is “Ignorant” of “Want.” Now Scrooge sees ignorance personified, and it horrifies and disgusts him. He cries out, “[H]ave they no recourse?” because these miserable creatures are not the same as the lazy people he imagines the poor to be. When the spirit answers back with Scrooge’s own words, he is saying, “You thought you knew your fellow man, but you did not.” Symbolically, it is significant that the spirit warns Scrooge especially against ignorance; while “want” can be dangerous (e.g., by fostering the conditions for violent uprising), ignorance is worse for allowing such deprivation to fester.

“The ways were foul and narrow; the shops and houses wretched; the people half naked, drunken, slipshod, ugly. Alleys and archways, like so many cesspools, disgorged their offences of smell, and dirt, and life upon the straggling streets; and the whole quarter reeked with crime, with filth and misery.”

The neighborhood of London that housed the “rag and bone” shops was notoriously foul-smelling and avoided by anyone who didn’t absolutely have to go there. Rag and bone picking was the resort of the desperate, who could bundle the rags and sell them to cloth merchants; the bones were used to make soap. This is the lowest rung of Victorian London society, and this is where Scrooge’s last remains end up despite everything he has done to shield himself from poverty and social disapprobation.

“‘Ha, ha!’ laughed the same woman when old Joe, producing a flannel bag with money in it, told out their several gains upon the ground. ‘This is the end of it, you see! He frightened every one away from him when he was alive, to profit us when he was dead! Ha, ha, ha!’”

Scrooge has reduced the world to profit, expecting that he would be respected and admired for his “success.” Instead, he sees a future in which he has been reduced to nothing but profit himself.

“He lay, in the dark, empty house, with not a man, a woman, or a child to say he was kind to me in this or that, and for the memory of one kind word I will be kind to him. A cat was tearing at the door, and there was a sound of gnawing rats beneath the hearth-stone. What they wanted in the room of death, and why they were so restless and disturbed, Scrooge did not dare to think.”

The cats and rats prowl the outer darkness for a chance to creep in and devour the corpse. The passage depicts not merely a room with a body in it but a kind of hell. Even so, this vision might not have mattered to Scrooge before his transformation; if even his body is property, there’s little point in caring what happens to it after its owner no longer needs it. It matters to Scrooge now because of what it says about his (or the stranger’s) life.

“The bed was his own, the room was his own. Best and happiest of all, the Time before him was his own, to make amends in!

‘I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future!’ Scrooge repeated as he scrambled out of bed. ‘The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. Oh, Jacob Marley! Heaven and the Christmas Time be praised for this! I say it on my knees, old Jacob; on my knees!’”

Scrooge has returned from the distorted time of the spirit world to the normal time of the ordinary world. He brings with him the lessons he learned in the spirit world. It is significant that in enumerating the things that are “his own,” Scrooge now focuses not on material possessions (the bed, the room, etc.) but on the time he has left to do good in the world.