After several turns, he sat down again. “Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. Dickens thus eliminates the potential for readers to conclude that significant change is hopeless and this ultimately functions to hold the reader accountable. ." It was a habit with Scrooge, whenever he became thoughtful, to put his hands in his breeches pockets. A Christmas Carol is a novella by Charles Dickens about Ebenezer Scrooge, an old man, who is well-known for his miserly. Cratchit excitedly hurries home to his family. He tells his nephew he should consider a career in Parliament. Merry Christmas! Scrooge shivered, and wiped the perspiration from his brow. Whether the tiles serve a symbolic function or not, Scrooge is preoccupied with Marley's face. Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with gladsome looks, “My dear Scrooge, how are you? Marley is condemned to walk the earth as a spirit and watch others' joy because he did nothing but count his money during his lifetime. Marley joins the "self-accusatory" chorus and floats out, through the window, into the night. The sound resounded through the house like thunder. He had been quite familiar with one old ghost, in a white waistcoat, with a monstrous iron safe attached to its ankle, who cried piteously at being unable to assist a wretched woman with an infant, whom it saw below, upon a doorstep. The apparition walked backward from him; and at every step it took, the window raised itself a little, so that when the spectre reached it, it was wide open. No warmth could warm, nor wintry weather chill him. That is, Scrooge helped the funeral ceremony occur with very few expenses. However, when Marley tells him he will be visited by three ghosts, Scrooge decides he would rather not. Additionally, it can mean being open to new ideas. Don't be flowery, Jacob! Scrooge desperately asks whether the things the spirit has shown him can be changed or whether they are set in stone, but the spirit only points with more determination. The workhouses were notoriously overcrowded, unclean, and many people nearly starved. Scrooge was not a man to be frightened by echoes. (1 John 3:17) The question is applicable, of course, not only to Marley but also to Scrooge-although readers may ask how much of others' need Scrooge actually does see. When the end of the business day arrives, Scrooge reluctantly closes his office. Readers can surmise that Scrooge's emotional-spiritual "death," just as Marley's physical one, "must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story" the narrator is about to tell. 71, Topic Tracking: Regret 1Topic Tracking: Charity 2Topic Tracking: Greed 2. Humbug, I tell you-humbug!”. “Humbug!” said Scrooge; and walked across the room. Be here all the earlier next morning!”. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge's name was good upon ’Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Even the Scrooges of the world cannot help but feel moved by what Scrooge's nephew accurately describes as "the only time...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." Yet such was I!" Piercing, searching, biting cold. Scrooge responds only with sneering sarcasm, asking the charity workers if such institutions as debtors' prisons and workhouses are still in operation: "[T]hose who are badly off must go there." Marley's hair is being blown "as if by breath or hot air," and wears an expression of horror. “But I see it,” said the Ghost, “notwithstanding.”, “Well!” returned Scrooge, “I have but to swallow this, and be for the rest of my days persecuted by a legion of goblins, all of my own creation. I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course,” said Scrooge. Stave 1: Scrooge hates Christmas, but the ghost of Marley visits hime to say that his life MUST change. Out upon merry Christmas! Obviously Scrooge's clerk is underpaid, but this is to be expected of such a parsimonious employer. Good afternoon, gentlemen!”. The winter weather is quite bad, and so the fog appropriately covers the keyhole. Scrooge closed the window, and examined the door by which the Ghost had entered. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. The narrator notes that the clerk has no greatcoat (heavy overcoat) to help him keep warm, as Scrooge has-a further detail that contributes to Dickens' indictment of social inequities. A chance and hope of my procuring, Ebenezer.”, “You were always a good friend to me,” said Scrooge. The clerk promised that he would; and Scrooge walked out with a growl. While winter weather can be harsh, it can still be beautiful. 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. Now, it is a fact, that there was nothing at all particular about the knocker on the door, except that it was very large. “Plenty of prisons,” said the gentleman, laying down the pen again. Dickens has established that Scrooge is like the winter weather—cold and abrasive. Scrooge considers his clerk another idiot who enjoys Christmas despite having to support a family on fifteen shillings a week. He warns that Scrooge is headed for the same fate, an even worse one considering his horrible spirit. Stave 1: Scrooge hates Christmas, but the ghost of Marley visits hime to say that his life MUST change. Marley likely wouldn't have been liberal with his money, and so the two gentlemen are simply using this phrasing to encourage Scrooge to donate. Since value was often equated with financial status, Scrooge, and others like him, failed to see value in those who needed financial assistance. I have sat invisible beside you many and many a day.”. “Seven years dead,” mused Scrooge. Since he lacks imagination and belief in anything, Scrooge insists on rational, practical explanations for anything. Scrooge tries to dismiss it in his usual manner but cannot. Having told the two gentlemen to leave and not given them any money, Scrooge's mood improves, further illustrating how much he prefers to hoard his money and not help others. A Christmas Carol is an allegorical story (a story with a moral lesson) and Dickens cleverly calls the five chapters “staves” as a means of creating an extended metaphor for his novel. More broadly, the nephew's words fix our attention on Scrooge's prime failing: an inability or unwillingness to view those around him as fellow human beings. This description of Christmas foreshadows what is going to happen to Scrooge because of the mystique of this holy day. Sign in, choose your GCSE subjects and see content that's tailored for you. Scrooge is a miser. One Christmas Eve-the narrator goes so far as to use the phrase, "Once upon a time," thus alerting readers to what genre the story that follows belongs-Scrooge is busily at work in his chilly counting-house. A “carol” is a religious hymn that is typically joyous and often associated with Christmas tales advocating charity and kindness. ways. When Scrooge dismisses Marley's Ghost as humbug-the same way, of course, in which he earlier dismissed Christmas-the specter shouts and shakes his chain loudly. It is unclear if Scrooge has read Malthus or not, but he seems to have been influenced by this popular belief that population control should start with the poor. His nature has shaped itself into his physical features so that people knew what he was without knowing him personally. And being, from the emotion he had undergone, or the fatigues of the day, or his glimpse of the Invisible World, or the dull conversation of the Ghost, or the lateness of the hour, much in need of repose, went straight to bed without undressing, and fell asleep upon the instant. Christmas, the nephew declares, is "the only time . Why give it as a reason for not coming now?”, “I want nothing from you; I ask nothing of you; why cannot we be friends?”, “I am sorry, with all my heart, to find you so resolute. Marley then opens the window and goes out howling. You’re quite a powerful speaker, sir,” he added, turning to his nephew. 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. 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." Then Scrooge hears the sound of heavy chains being dragged up the stairs toward his room. While today, this kind of game might be associated with children, Blind Man’s Buff was popular amongst children and adults alike. Scrooge keeps the coal for the fire in his own office, and will not allow his clerk access to it-a small, almost sadistic detail that highlights Scrooge's misanthropic attitude. Marley has been dead these seven years,” Scrooge replied. “It comes from other regions, Ebenezer Scrooge, and is conveyed by other ministers to other kinds of men. It was a distinguishing characteristic of Charles Dickens that he wrote about dismal subjects with a touch of humor. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”. His body was transparent: so that Scrooge, observing him, and looking through his waistcoat, could see the two buttons on his coat behind. Pray!”, “How it is that I appear before you in a shape that you can see, I may not tell. “Good afternoon!”, “Nay, uncle, but you never came to see me before that happened. Dickens repeats the word "sole" here for a very particular purpose. When the Egyptian Pharaoh ordered that all newborn Jewish boys be killed, Moses’s mother Jochebed built a small ark and sent the baby Moses down the Nile River so that he might be saved. Learn exactly what happened in this chapter, scene, or section of A Christmas Carol and what it means. You may talk vaguely about driving a coach-and-six up a good old flight of stairs, or through a bad young Act of Parliament; but I mean to say you might have got a hearse up that staircase, and taken it broadwise, with the splinter-bar towards the wall, and the door towards the balustrades: and done it easy. This reinforces his greedy, self-serving nature and shows that he has yet to start changing for the better. Once he is satisfied that all is well, he locks himself into his room, fastening both door locks, although using only one was his custom. a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Dickens does not, at this point, allude to Cain's question to God, "Am I my brother's keeper?" Marley's words may contain an allusion to the denunciation of an unjust society given by the Old Testament prophet Micah: "He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?"

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