A Christmas CarolStudy Guide

On Christmas Eve, Ebenezer Scrooge keeps the coal-box locked in his own room while his clerk, Bob Cratchit, blows on his fingers over a single candle in the outer office. His nephew Fred stops by to invite him to dinner and gets thrown out with a string of good-afternoons for his trouble. Two gentlemen collecting for the poor ask for a subscription. Scrooge answers with prisons, workhouses, and the wish that those who would rather die should decrease the surplus population. He grudges Cratchit a paid holiday, locks up the counting-house, and walks home alone to Marley's old chambers, dark and cold and empty seven years to the night since his partner died.

Marley's ghost comes through the locked door that night, dragging a chain forged link by link out of cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, and ledgers. Mankind was my business, he cries, warns that Scrooge is forging a chain heavier still, and promises three spirits as the only way out. The first shows a boy reading alone after the other children have gone home for the holiday, an old employer named Fezziwig throwing a warehouse dance generous enough to make his apprentices weep with gratitude, and Belle releasing a younger Scrooge because a golden idol has already replaced her in his affections. Each scene is a door he chose to close himself, one hinge at a time.

The second spirit opens the Cratchit parlour, where a small goose somehow feeds the whole family, Bob proposes a toast to the founder of the feast, and Tiny Tim's crutch leans by the hearth within reach of his father's chair. If these shadows remain unaltered, the spirit warns, the boy will die, then throws Scrooge's own surplus-population line back at him before showing Fred toasting his uncle's health anyway, humbug and all. The third spirit says nothing and shows nothing gentle. It only points: to merchants trading jokes about a cheap funeral, to a charwoman selling stolen bed-curtains off a corpse, and to a neglected churchyard stone whose name Scrooge is too frightened to read until the spirit forces his hand toward it, finger fixed on the letters that spell his own end.

He wakes on Christmas morning begging for a second chance, and Charles Dickens spends barely a page proving people can change fast once they finally see clearly. Scrooge sends the biggest turkey in the poulterer's window to the Cratchits without saying who it is from, gives generously to the same charity collectors he insulted the day before, and turns up at Fred's door hoping he still has a place at the table. He raises Bob's wage the next morning and helps the family further in ways the book leaves open, becoming, in Dickens's own words, as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man as the good old city knew. He is not lectured into goodness. He is shown the schoolboy, the clerk's wage, and the grave, and has to decide, awake, what those pictures are worth.

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