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- Herausgeber: Century Audio
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Serie: Capstone Classics
- Sprache: Englisch
A timeless tale of redemption and the spirit of Christmas
A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens' beloved novella, captures the essence of the festive season and the transformative power of kindness and compassion. Written in 1843, this classic story has become synonymous with Christmas and continues to resonate with readers of all ages.
Set in Victorian London, A Christmas Carol follows the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge, who is visited by the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come. Through these supernatural encounters, Scrooge is forced to confront his own selfishness and the impact of his actions on others. The novella explores themes of generosity, forgiveness, and the importance of human connection.
Dickens' vivid portrayal of the bustling streets of London and the stark contrast between wealth and poverty serves as a powerful social commentary on the inequalities of the time. The story's enduring appeal lies in its universal message of hope and the possibility of change, making it a perfect read for the festive season.
Despite being published over 180 years ago, A Christmas Carol remains relevant today, reminding us of the importance of empathy and the joy that comes from helping others. It's perfect for fans of classic literature and those seeking a heartwarming tale to celebrate the spirit of Christmas.
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Table of Contents
COVER
TABLE OF CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
INTRODUCTION
THE BOOK THAT DEFINED CHRISTMAS
GHOST STORY, FABLE, OR VICTORIAN SOCIAL COMMENTARY?
DICKENS' GOTHIC VISION
SCROOGE AND THE SUPERNATURAL
THE SYMBOLISM OF SCROOGE
THE GHOST OF CHRISTMAS PAST: MEMORY AND LOST OPPORTUNITY
THE GHOST OF CHRISTMAS PRESENT: ABUNDANCE AMID POVERTY
THE GHOST OF CHRISTMAS YET TO COME: DEATH AND LEGACY
THE TRANSFORMATION
SOURCES AND FURTHER READING
OTHER CHRISTMAS STORIES
DICKENS CHRONOLOGY
NOTES
STAVE ONE: MARLEY'S GHOST
NOTES
STAVE TWO: THE FIRST OF THE THREE SPIRITS
NOTES
STAVE THREE: THE SECOND OF THE THREE SPIRITS
NOTES
STAVE FOUR: THE LAST OF THE SPIRITS
NOTES
STAVE FIVE: THE END OF IT
NOTES
THE CHIMES
FIRST QUARTER
SECOND QUARTER
THIRD QUARTER
FOURTH QUARTER
THE CRICKET ON THE HEARTH
CHAPTER I—CHIRP THE FIRST
CHAPTER II—CHIRP THE SECOND
CHAPTER III—CHIRP THE THIRD
END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT
Guide
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
The Chimes
The Cricket on the Hearth
End User License Agreement
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A CHRISTMAS CAROL
The Festive Classic
CHARLES DICKENS
With an Introduction byTOM BUTLER-BOWDON
This edition first published 2026
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INTRODUCTION
BY TOM BUTLER-BOWDON
THE BOOK THAT DEFINED CHRISTMAS
A Christmas Carol was published on 19th December, 1843. It was an instant success.
By Christmas Eve, the original crimson and gilt edition had sold out, and reprintings continued through 1844. It has never gone out of print since. The story fell into public consciousness, elevating it to the status of fable or even parable. Dickens' friend William Makepeace Thackeray proclaimed it a “national benefit … a personal kindness,” although not all contemporaries were immediate fans. Mark Twain famously derided the novel as no more than “glittering frostwork.”
Dickens was under financial pressure when he wrote it, and yet his genuine love for Christmas shines through. The book helped invent the modern Christmas—a time of carols, trees, and cards, where grudges are forgotten and affectionate revelry reigns. His name became so synonymous with the holiday that an apocryphal costermonger's girl, learning of Dickens' death in 1870, asked: “Will Father Christmas die too?”
Dickens continued to publish Christmas stories annually until 1867—two of which we include in this volume—and his Christmas magazine editorials regularly had 300,000 readers. Even if none eclipsed the brilliance of A Christmas Carol, they contributed to Dickens' special creative ownership of Christmas, which authors as diverse as Ralph Waldo Emerson and George Orwell commented on.
The work has been echoed and copied in films from Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1947) to The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) to The Grinch Who Stole Christmas (2000). It even spawned new terms. “Scrooge” features in the Cambridge Dictionary as “someone who spends as little money as possible and is not generous.”
Despite its pervading benevolence, there is a darkness to A Christmas Carol which signals real artistic ambition. This Introduction, by tracing the arc of Scrooge's characterisation and focusing on a string of touchstone scenes, seeks to provide some literary, biographical, and socioeconomic context that might enhance a reading of Dickens' classic.
Charles Dickens on his second visit to America in 1867–68. By Jeremiah Gurney.
GHOST STORY, FABLE, OR VICTORIAN SOCIAL COMMENTARY?
The original title of the novella is:
A Christmas Carol.
In Prose.
Being a
Ghost Story of Christmas.
It certainly is a ghost story, one of the ghost stories, despite its festive setting. In declaring it so, Dickens reminds us that for all his foray into the fantastic supernatural—what might now be called Magical Realism—A Christmas Carol is simply a novel. Even so, it is a most theatrical and performative one, popularly recited by Dickens himself until his death in 1870.
A Christmas Carol is ostensibly a simple cautionary tale or fable. Dickens cleverly invokes Grimm fairy tales with the line, “once upon a time … old Scrooge sat busy in his counting house.” It's a genre that, with its themes of conversion, reconciliation, and transformation, captivated Dickens.
Most fables and tales have a horrible figure. In her Dickens biography, Claire Tomalin characterises Ebenezer Scrooge* as “a monster, a wicked employer and a heartless miser.” Scrooge loathes the Christmas period, which he sees as merely a time for balancing the books. It brings him no extra profit. Dickens' narrator paints him as a “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner!,” a man as “solitary as an oyster.” Despite high regard from colleagues at the Royal Exchange for his credit and business skills, Scrooge is a cold, unfeeling man and the embodiment of misanthropy.
Scrooge's settled, spiritual poverty is threatened by three ghosts presenting visions of his past, present, and future. Their coming is triggered by the arrival of an apparition of his former business partner, Jacob Marley. Throughout the course of these three nights of visitations, Scrooge is ultimately converted to an open, joyous recipient of the Christmas occasion. In spite of readers being told early on that “nothing wonderful can come from the story,” Dickens slyly sets out to prove that prediction wrong.
Yet scholars have long interrogated the heart of darkness in this yuletide tale and its didactic and sociopolitical messages. In February 1843, the effects of the Industrial Revolution on forced labour were exposed in a parliamentary report. Dickens was deeply engaged in social issues such as this and would have been aware of the report. Michael Slater, in his work on Dickens' motivations, argues that his novelistic contributions to contemporary societal issues have had a real impact beyond mere moralising or didactic satire.
Indeed, before delving into the story itself and its meaning, it's important to understand the social, political, and economic times in which Dickens penned A Christmas Carol.
1843 first edition of
A Christmas Carol
, with illustrations by John Leech.
DICKENS' GOTHIC VISION
One character that Dickens wished to celebrate was London itself. Scrooge's wandering of London's streets is modelled on Charles' own long evening walks in a period of weeks while A Christmas Carol was being written. Dan Schlicke notes that Dickens “wept and laughed and wept again … around the black streets of London fifteen or twenty miles many a night when all sober folks had gone to bed” (Schlicke, 98).
He wished to create the brooding atmosphere of a ghost story in which “darkness is cheap.” The story begins with a reference to the most iconic work of this genre—Shakespeare's Hamlet—but in this case relocated from the ramparts of a castle in Denmark to London's St. Paul's Churchyard.
The city he portrays is perhaps the most ghostly of Dickens' London treatments, one of isolation, mourning, and tragedy, even amid the scenes of communal merriment and reverie. What other novella is so tethered in this way to both the geographical reality of early-Victorian life and the metaphysical topography of unreality and the supernatural?
The work is infused throughout with Gothic inflection, complete with a dark and wintry London setting in which “the fog and darkness thickened so, that people ran about with flaring links.”
It's likely that the light and darkness, fire and chill, portrayed are the binaries that Dickens used to reflect moral distinctions.
SCROOGE AND THE SUPERNATURAL
That A Christmas Carol aimed to be a haunting and hypnotic text is clear from its elegiac opening line in Stave One: “Marley was dead: to begin with.”
This is an uncharacteristically bare opening sentence if we consider Dickens' famed introductory paragraphs from A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Hard Times (1854), Great Expectations (1861), and Martin Chuzzelwit (1844). The line, with its morbid matter-of-fact judgment and ironic mention of ‘beginning,’ signals Dickens' larger interest in the fluidity of time—or as he puts it, the Past, Present, and Yet To Come.
Scrooge was Marley's “sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend, and sole mourner.” Yet we are left to consider what the relationship meant to Scrooge. They were “kindred spirits,” and yet we are informed by the objective, somewhat voyeuristic narrator, that 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.” Dickens suggests the interchangeability of the two men: “sometimes people new to the business called Scrooge Scrooge,* and sometimes Marley, but [Scrooge] answered to both names.” Yet Scrooge only seems able to process the loss in bureaucratic and procedural terms, noting the “clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner” who certified the events.
But cracks in Scrooge's cold, bureaucratic world start to appear.
The first hints of the supernatural come when Scrooge's door knocker transforms into Marley's face. As readers, we have been conditioned to view Scrooge as a negative, non-feeling presence. Yet now the arch pragmatist is forced to fight “against his senses,” declaring that “‘It's humbug still!’ … ‘I won't believe it!’” Scrooge, in a dramatically short time frame, enters into a state of paranoia, such as believing he sees a “locomotive hearse going on before him in the gloom.”
Dickens is blending these lines of reality, fantasy and nightmare in a strange dream-like logic, as Marley's face begins to appear on the fireplace alongside biblical and hagiographic tiles, “like the ancient Prophet's rod … with power to shape some picture on its surface from the disjointed fragments of his thoughts.” In this new spiritual topography, where the rules of time and space are evaded, a Church bell rings for what “seemed an hour” and a “strange, inexplicable dread” takes hold.*
Scrooge's fading memories of Marley are replaced by a hellish transparent spectre of Marley with “death-cold eyes” and a chain, “clasped about his middle … long, and wound about him like a tail” with “cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel.” It is testament to Dickens' gifts that even in these darkest narrative moments humour is still injected, such as Scrooge's begging to receive all three ghostly encounters immediately: “‘I—I think I'd rather not … couldn't I take ‘em all at once.’” He masterfully creates the atmosphere of Scrooge's anxiety, relating that he “thought, and thought, and thought it over and over and over, and that the more he endeavoured not to think, the more he thought.”
THE SYMBOLISM OF SCROOGE
Scrooge, in his iconic outfit of “slippers, dressing-gown and nightcap,” is an almost pantomimic character—a man that even “blind men's dogs” are wary of, and not even “beggars implored him to bestow a trifle.”
Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in a period of great impoverishment and austerity known as the Hungry Forties. Precipitated by the English potato blight, it led to widespread food shortages and a famine and depression through the 1840s. Poor harvests and lack of change to the Corn Law pricing led to unemployment, population decline, and growing revolutionary sentiment among the poor. These shifts were laid bare in texts such as Friedrich Engels' The Condition of the Working Class (1845), which focused on his experiences of the industrial working class in Salford and Manchester.
Dickens was deeply interested in the plight of the poor, and liked to satirise the attitudes that contributed to The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834.* This changed the previously parish-based assistance to include re-housing children in Draconian workhouses that aimed to reduce costs and street begging. Scrooge, in an echo of today's rich complaining about “welfare scroungers,” claims that he “can't afford to make idle people merry.”
Dickens' critique of Scrooge's alignment of virtue and capital is made plain in his conversation with nephew Fred, when he asks him, “what reason have you to be merry? You're poor enough.” Dickens sprinkles such class considerations through the text in subtle ways, contrasting the craven nature of employers with the cheeriness of the worker. He paints a slightly romantic picture of labourers repairing the gas pipes who, “had lighted a great fire in a brazier, round which a party of ragged men and boys were gathered: warming their hands and winking their eyes before the blaze in rapture.”
In contrast, Scrooge expresses an all-encompassing coldness and thermal meanness that “made his eyes red, his thin lips blue … 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.”‡ Fred, Scrooge's nephew, offers an alternative warmth, noting that his fellow Londoners are “fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures.” Yet Scrooge measures and separates every person according to their perceived wealth or mendacity. He meets the request of employee Bob Cratchit to be excused from work on Christmas with the remark that the holiday is “a poor excuse for picking a man's pocket.” In 1843, Christmas Day was considered a holiday from work, although not a paid one.
Dickens conveys Scrooge's extreme economy by describing his unheated chambers as a “gloomy suite of rooms … the yard was so dark that even Scrooge, who knew its every stone, was fain to grope with his hands. The fog and frost so hung about the old gateway of the house.”
In short, Scrooge is Dickens' straw man for the worst aspects of free-market capitalism, which in his mind tears apart the natural social bonds among men. For Scrooge, there are no “moral sentiments” (as Adam Smith described these bonds in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759) that can confirm human beings as essentially social creatures, not mere units in an economy.
Page from
London labour and the London poor; a cyclopaedia
(1861) by Henry Matthew and Willian Tuckniss.
THE GHOST OF CHRISTMAS PAST: MEMORY AND LOST OPPORTUNITY
In Stave Two, at the first ghostly visitation, Scrooge is led into a cold, mystical landscape where the familiar urban markers have “entirely vanished … not a vestige of it was to be seen.” In its place, he is taken by a bare path towards the “shadows of things that have been,” presented with memories that imbue him with a new emotional complexity, in a voice “between laughing or crying.”
In a Proustian moment, Scrooge's recollections flood back with a “thousand odours floating in the air, each connected with a thousand thoughts, and hopes, and joys, and cares long, long, forgotten!” These figments portray Scrooge in an entirely different light to our previous associations of him as an old miser. When he finds himself sitting down at the classroom bench where he spent his formative years, he “wept to see his poor forgotten self as he used to be.”
Scrooge movingly recalls his sister Fan, and her seeming fear of their father, telling a young Scrooge that “Father is so much kinder than he used to be … he spoke so gently to me one dear night that I was not afraid to ask him once more that you might come home.” Dickens manages to imbue both a sense of joyous hope and melancholy in Fan's proclamations that, “you're to be a man … and are never to come back here; but first, we're to be together all the Christmas long, and have the merriest time in all the world.”
Scholars such as Robert Douglas-Fairhurst and Richard Kelly have suggested that Stave Two reflects the pains of Dickens' own childhood. His impoverished youth, shaded by his father in debtor's prison, his grandfather being an embezzler, and his notorious exploitation at a boot blacking factory,* makes Scrooge's flashback scenes all the more moving and layered. Dickens' childhood experience, combined with his later philanthropy putting him in contact with the poor, give Stave Two a cinematic purity. He had been deeply inspired by a visit to the Field Lane Ragged School, a home for street children in Manchester. He later established a reformatory home for delinquent young women, financed by his friend Angela Burdett-Coutts, heiress to her grandfather's banking fortune.
Stave Two's sense of longing and regret is mixed with joy, when Dickens treats us to the scenes with the Fezziwig family, former employers of Scrooge. The Fezziwig ball has a kinetic sense of activity, with mulled wine, food and “dances … and more dances, and there was cake … and there were mince-pies, and plenty of beer.” The warehouse was “as snug, and warm, and dry, and bright as a ballroom,” and the narrator remarks of Mrs. Fezziwig's dancing, “if that's not high praise, tell me higher, and I'll use it!”
Even in these nostalgic images, where Scrooge's “heart and soul … corroborated everything, remembered everything, enjoyed everything,” a murky darkness settles when these “cheerful voices died away,” and gratitude gives way to agitation. Scrooge revisits a conversation with his ex-fiancee Belle, who laments Scrooge's fixation on financial success, declaring that “another idol has displaced [her].” Belle's home is “not very large or handsome, but full of comfort,” but contains “shouts of wonder and delight … the joy, and gratitude, and ecstasy!” as we see her husband return home. Scrooge is confronted with what he has lost in his pursuit of financial security, with his spiritual development clearly frozen in an earlier time.
These scenes recall Dickens' real-life failed courtship of, and rejection by, Maria Beadnell, who had been unimpressed at his prospects. Also filling the pages like a ghost is his troubled marriage to Catherine Hogarth. From mid-1858 onwards, Catherine Dickens lived separately from Charles, which created a scandal. He also had an affair with actress Ellen Ternan, whom he met during a run of the play The Frozen Deep (a co-production between himself and Wilkie Collins).* The disclosed letters of this period have caused scholars to question the nature and extent of this relationship, including the potential children it may have spawned and Ellen's continued presence as Charles' mistress into the 1860s.
Ellen Ternan, photographer unknown.
THE GHOST OF CHRISTMAS PRESENT: ABUNDANCE AMID POVERTY
In Stave Three we see Scrooge, having taken in the vignettes of his past, “restored to consciousness in the right nick of time.” There is a more paranoid narrative style, with the narrator sometimes directly addressing us.
While Scrooge is still dealing with the scarring events of the previous evening, the Ghost of Christmas Present appears in a blaze of light “more alarming than a dozen ghosts.” The room is transformed with “mistletoe, holly and ivy falling from the ceiling … a mighty blaze went roaring up the chimney,” and a feast of Christmas fare on which a giant figure sits. The spirit has a “genial face … sparkling eye” and wears a “simple green robe, or mantle, bordered with white fur” but “girded round its middle … an antique scabbard; but no sword was in it … eaten up with rust.” What might we read into this apparent item of threat and violence, now removed? Perhaps Christmas is a time when old animosities are set aside.
The scene soon fades to the city streets, which Dickens gives an intriguing mix of gloom, serenity, and joviality:
“the sky was gloomy, and the shortest streets were choked up with a dingy mist, half thawed, half frozen, whose heavier particles descended in a shower of sooty atoms, as if all the chimneys in Great Britain had, by one consent, caught fire, and were blazing away to their dear hearts' content. There was nothing very cheerful in the climate or the town, and yet was there an air of cheerfulness abroad that the clearest summer air and brightest summer sun might have endeavoured to diffuse in vain.”
He presents a scene of further abundance at a marketplace, with grocers presenting a cornucopia of “pears and apples, clustered high in blooming pyramids: there were bunches of grapes, made, in the shopkeepers' benevolence to dangle from conspicuous hooks, that people's mouths might water gratis as they passed.”
Soon we are introduced to the many members of the Cratchit family, who, despite their “threadbare clothes darned up and brushed,” are blessed with a merriment typified by fragile Tiny Tim. Dickens gives the scene of their Christmas table an olfactory splendour that is worth repeating:
“Hallo! A great deal of steam! The pudding was out of the copper. A smell like a washing-day! That was the cloth. A smell like an eating-house and a pastrycook's next door to each other, with a laundress's next door to that! That was the pudding! … the pudding, like a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of half-a-quartern of ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top.”
The sense of family fun as a central notion to Christmas breathes through each line of this section, as we witness the Cratchits' teasing of Scrooge as the “Ogre of the family,” and a man whose mere “name cast a dark shadow on the party.”
The Cratchits are “not well dressed; their shoes were far from being water-proof; their clothes were scanty … but they were happy, grateful, pleased with one another.” Dickens places them in a space of almost heavenly light (they “looked happier yet in the bright sprinklings of the Spirit's torch”), contrasted with the darkness outside. The most interesting aspect is Tiny Tim and Dickens' nineteenth century portrayal of the child's disability. Tim himself muses that “he hoped people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.”
Tim's future is held hostage by Scrooge's actions, as the Spirit bargains with him that if not for an improved past, Tim will die because of Scrooge's selfishness (“I see a vacant seat … In the poor chimney-corner, and a crutch without an owner, carefully preserved”). With this scene, Dickens is mocking Scrooge's previous Malthusian population growth concerns. Scrooge, in a moment of realisation, is “overcome with penitence and grief” for the frigid impersonality of his views, which amount to deciding which people will live and which will die.
Illustration for
The Children’s Dickens: Stories selected from various tales
(1909), London: Henry Frowde and Hodder and Stoughton, by Gilbert Scott Wright.
Now wandering through the streets again, Scrooge becomes an isolated observer of life, seeing through frosted windows the “Brightness of the roaring fires in kitchens, parlours, and all sorts of rooms … preparations for a cosy dinner, with hot plates baking through and through before the fire, and deep red curtains, ready to be drawn to shut out cold and darkness.” These strangers are the sum of their family engagements, with “children … running out into the snow to meet their married sisters, brothers, cousins, uncles, aunts … the shadows of the window-blind of guests assembling” and a “group of handsome girls, all hooded and fur-booted, and all chattering at once, tripped lightly off to some near neighbour's house.”
From these city scenes, Dickens shifts the reader to an isolated miner's cottage and seascape with people who “labour in the bowels of the earth.” We are given one of the more breath-taking lines in A Christmas Carol:
“Monstrous masses of rude stone were cast about, as though it were the burial-place of giants; and water spread itself wheresoever it listed, or would have done so, but for the frost that held it prisoner; and nothing grew but moss and furze, and coarse rank grass. Down in the west the setting sun had left a streak of fiery red, which glared upon the desolation for an instant, like a sullen eye, and frowning lower, lower, lower yet, was lost in the thick gloom of darkest night”
The stark environment is a mimicry of Scrooge's metaphysical state, yet even in these grim surroundings there is a scene of companionship. Dickens describes “two men who watched the light had made a fire … wished each other Merry Christmas in their can of grog.” When Scrooge introspects “what a solemn thing it was to move on through the lonely darkness over an unknown abyss, whose depths were secrets as profound as Death,” something is clearly shifting in him.
In the remainder of the stave, Dickens contrasts Fred's family, who play merry music and games of blind-man's bluff and Yes and No and delight in Topper's antics, all “clustered around the fire, by lamplight,” with the barren heart of Scrooge, who now becomes the object of our pity.
In an attempt to ingrain this Stave in our memory, Dickens conjures the shocking image of Innocence and Want, two children “yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish … where angels might have sat throned, devils lurked, and glared out menacingly … monsters half so horrible and dread”—the product of humankind's sins.
THE GHOST OF CHRISTMAS YET TO COME: DEATH AND LEGACY
In Stave Four, the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come is an unspeaking phantom “draped and hooded, coming, like a mist along the ground.” This being seems to engender in Scrooge a strange reverence, as he genuflects in front of it.
The only discerning feature of the ghost is darkness itself, which is a decided shift from the frequent reminders in earlier staves of light, radiance and warmth: “but for [one outstretched hand] it would have been difficult to detach its figure from the night, and separate it from the darkness by which it was surrounded.” The figure embodies a “vague uncertain horror, to know that behind the dusky shroud, there were ghostly eyes … [Scrooge] could see nothing but a spectral hand and one great heap of black.”
The apparition is yet another way Dickens tries to infect the reader with a horror of commerce and the deathly melancholy of business. The spirit shows Scrooge “merchants; who hurried up and down, and chinked the money in their pockets, and conversed in groups, and looked at their watches, and trifled thoughtfully with their great gold seals.” We see a group of strangers mock an unknown man's death, filtered almost entirely through terms of company inheritance and the expenses of his funeral. The group includes a “red-faced gentleman with a pendulous excrescence on the end of his nose, that shook like the gills of a turkey-cock.” When one of them offers to attend the funeral only on condition that food is provided, Dickens again connects the cycles of life and death with food and decomposition.
Scrooge is led by the “Unseen Eyes” to places of great moral corruption with stinking alleyways and drunk, half-naked people: “the whole quarter reeked with crime, with filth, and misery.” He is placed in the unpleasant company of an undertaker, laundress and charwoman in a “low-browed, beetling shop, below a pent-house roof, where iron, old rags, bottles, bones, and greasy offal, were bought.” The stifling atmosphere only gets heavier as Dickens colours the space with objects reminiscent of Marley's chains: “piled up heaps of rusty keys, nails, chains, hinges, files, scales, weights, and refuse iron of all kinds.”
The trio judge a dead man's possessions to re-sell to a fence. Scrooge can only watch on in petrified silence as they debate the wastage of burying someone in calico clothing. Scrooge, in a rash of humanity, feels contempt well up in him for this alignment of the body with its earthly possessions.
Dickens contrasts this moment to the saddening scene of the Cratchits mourning Tiny Tim's imminent death. After sitting upstairs with Tim to compose himself, Bob resolves that the family will remember Tiny Tim's godly spirit by never quarrelling again.
Moved by the scene, Scrooge sees the results of his philosophical indifference to humanity. His final pleas for mercy are bound in the appreciation for Christmas as a symbol for the conjoining of past, present and future, as an intercession and spectral release to “sponge away the writing on this stone.”
THE TRANSFORMATION
Stave Five, subtitled “The End of It,” sees Scrooge awaken from his supernatural voyage. The first reassuring indications of his return come with his unseemly delight at seeing his possessions again: “Yes! The bedpost was his own. The bed was his own, the room was his own.” A new zest for life reveals itself with a hyperactive folding of bed-curtains and garments, “turning them inside out, putting them on upside down, tearing them, mislaying them, making them parties to every kind of extravagance.”
We know Scrooge's transformation is complete because he is now irrationally emotional: “he had been sobbing violently in his conflict with the Spirit, and his face was wet with tears.” If character in the mid-nineteenth century novel is traditionally defined by active intent, then Scrooge's declaration that “I don't know what to do!” is telling, as is his astonished realisation that, “I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy. I am as giddy as a drunken man.”
Dickens offers us a frenetic, kaleidoscopic view of Scrooge's interior landscape, moving rapidly from stimulus to stimulus, with each sensory moment worthy of jubilation. Even the mere ringing of a church bell is imbued with a joy that eludes conventional narrative terms: “Clash, clang, hammer; ding, dong, bell. Bell, dong, ding; hammer, clang, clash! Oh, glorious, glorious!”
Scrooge's responses go beyond reason to the same extent he once attached himself to worldly possessions. He shows no hesitation in deciding upon the object that will symbolize his rebirth: the turkey. Having once turned away a carol-singing boy on Christmas eve, the new Scrooge sends a boy to the poulterer to buy the biggest turkey in the shop and deliver it to the delighted Cratchits.
Contrary to popular belief, Dickens did not invent the tradition of the Christmas turkey. It had been part of upper-class festivities from as early as the fifteenth century. However, Dickens can be credited for forming a turkey fetish in the working classes. Zavia Gorvett reports that Dickens' tour manager George Dolby promised to send the biggest turkey he could find to Dickens after the novel's publication, but the hamper caught fire on a horse ride to London, and the burnt remains were gifted to poor local families. It has even been suggested that the turkey tradition was inspired by Dickens' contentious five-month tour of America as a newfound literary celebrity, an experience covered in his American Notes (1842).
In the fifth stave, Scrooge takes further fiscal steps to prove his redemption, providing a charity donation to the “portly gentlemen” that were previously scorned in Stave One. He cuts an absurd figure as, walking to Fred's party, he “watched the people hurrying to and fro, and patted children on the head, and questioned beggars, and looked down into the kitchens of houses.”
The closing of the novella takes place, fittingly, at the office. Scrooge rather cruelly pranks Bob for his tardiness, waiting for his pleas before shocking him with a salary raise. It is an act so unexpected that Bob has “a momentary idea of knocking Scrooge down with [a ruler], holding him, and calling to the people in the court for help and a strait-waistcoat.”
A coda informs us that Scrooge continues to assist with the Cratchits' affairs, being “better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more.” Spoiler alert: We learn that Tiny Tim does not die and indeed becomes Scrooge's great friend. The spirit's bargain has been taken up with alacrity, and nothing makes the old miser happier.
The narrator leaves us with a self-help message that Samuel Smiles* would have been proud of. Scrooge becomes “as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world.”
Dickens concludes by reflecting on laughter, noting of Scrooge that, “some people laughed to see the alteration in him,† but he let them laugh … he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins. His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him.”
If it's enough for Scrooge, and enough for Dickens, then it should be enough for us—to relish in the power of A Christmas Carol as a tale both cautionary, profound, and sensational.
SOURCES AND FURTHER READING
Ackroyd, Peter,
Dickens
, Vintage, 2012.
Britton, Boyd, Claypole, Jonty and Gee, Sophie,
Did Dickens Change the Face of Christmas Forever? Scrooge, Tiny Tim and the First Ever Turkey
, The Secret Life of Books
, Podcast, University of Sydney Business School, 24 December 2024.
Briggs, Julia,
Night Visitors: the Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story
, Faber, 1977.
Burgis, Nina, Storey, Graham and Tillotsen, Kathleen,
The Pilgrim Edition of the Letters of Charles Dickens
, Oxford University Press, 1988.
Callow, Simon,
Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World
, HarperCollins, 2012.
Carlyle, Thomas,
Kinser, Brent [editor] and Sorensen, David [editor]
,
Past and Present
, Oxford World Classics, 2023.
Chesterton, G.K.,
Charles Dickens
, Methuen and Co., 1906.
Collins, Philip,
Dickens: The Critical Heritage
, Routledge, 1971.
Davis, Paul,
Lives and Times of Ebenezer Scrooge
, Yale University Press, 1990.
Dickens, Charles,
A Christmas Carol
, Charles Dickens, Penguin, 2010.
Dickens, Charles,
and Kelly, Richard [editor]
,
A Christmas Carol
, Broadview Press, 2003.
Dickens, Charles,
and Slater, Michael [editor]
,
A Christmas Carol and other Christmas Stories
, Penguin, 2003.
Douglas-Fairhurst, Robert,
A Christmas Carol and other Stories
,
Oxford University Press
, 2006.
Forster, John,
The Life of Charles Dickens
, Chapman and Hall, 1872.
Glancy, Ruth, ‘Dickens and Christmas: His Framed-Tale Themes’,
Nineteenth Century
Fiction
, 1980, vol. 35.
Gorvett, Zavia, ‘How the Turkey Conquered Christmas,’
BBC
, 17 December 2021.
Grossmann, Jonathan H.
Charles Dickens' Networks: Public Transport and the Novel
, Oxford University Press, 2016.
Hartley, Jenny,
Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women
, Methuen, 2009.
Hornby, Nick,
Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius
, Viking, 2022.
Jones, Sam,
‘
Ebenezer Scrooge named most popular Dickens character
,’
The Guardian
, 2012.
Kelly, Richard,
A Christmas Carol
, Broadview Press, 2003.
Moore, Grace,
Dickens and Empire: Discourses of Race, Class and Colonialism in the Works of Charles Dickens
, Ashgate, 2004.
Parker, David,
Charles Dickens and Christmas
, Arms Pr., 2003.
Pimlott, J.A.R.,
The Englishman's Christmas: A Social History
, Harvester Press, 1978.
Sasaki, Toru, ‘Ghosts in
A Christmas Carol
: A Japanese View’,
The
Dickensian
, 1997, vol. 92.
Schlicke, Paul
[editor],
The Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens
, Oxford University Press, 1999.
Slater, Michael,
Charles Dickens
, Yale University Press, 2011.
Slater, Michael,
Dickens and Women
,
J.M. Dent, 1983.
Smiley, Jane,
Charles Dickens
, Viking, 2002.
Tomalin, Claire,
Charles Dickens: A Life
, Penguin, 2011.
Thomas, Deborah,
Dickens and the Short Story
, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982.
Walder, Dennis,
Dickens and Religion
, Allen and Unwin, 1981.
Waters, Catherine,
Dickens and the Politics of Family
, Cambridge University Press, 1997.
OTHER CHRISTMAS STORIES
This edition includes two bonus Christmas stories that Dickens published in the wake of the success of A Christmas Carol.
The Chimes (1844) follows Trotty Veck, a poor ticket-porter who becomes despondent about the state of the world and the plight of the poor. On New Year's Eve he has a supernatural encounter with goblins associated with church bells. In an echo of Scrooge's spiritual journey, they show him a bleak vision of the future if he loses his faith and conscience. Like A Christmas Carol, the story carries a strong social message about compassion, and Dickens confronts the prevailing Malthusian and utilitarian philosophies that often blamed the poor for their destitution.
The Cricket on the Hearth (1845) centres on the Peerybingle family and the seemingly magical presence of a cricket on their fireplace which acts as a guardian angel. Misunderstandings and deceptions threaten their domestic happiness, but ultimately the tale resolves into a heart-warming celebration of home, family, and loyalty during the festive season. It was very popular in its time, second only to the success of A Christmas Carol.
DICKENS CHRONOLOGY
1812: Charles John Huffam Dickens is born on 7th February in Portsmouth, England, to John (a clerk at the Navy Pay Office) and Catherine Dickens. He is the second of eight children.
1817: After earlier periods in Fitzrovia, London, and Sheerness, Kent, the Dickens family move to Chatham, Kent. Charles lives there until the age of eleven, attending school from around age nine and developing a fascination with picaresque novels, particularly the works of Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding.
1822: The family relocate to Camden, London, and amid rising expenses Dickens' father is sent to Marshalsea Debtors Prison. Charles is sent to work at Warren's Blacking Warehouse near Charing Cross, working ten-hour days and earning six shillings per week. The experience reverberates through Dickens' oeuvre, especially the Newgate novels and David Copperfield (1850).
This year also sees the death of Dickens's grandmother. The legacy she leaves enables John Dickens to be released from Marshalsea Debtors Prison. Charles is removed from Warren's Blacking Warehouse and attends Wellington House Academy. Elizabeth Dickens does not initially support her son's leaving the warehouse, which contributes to a long-lasting and troubled relationship between them.
1827: Dickens becomes a solicitor's clerk at Ellis and Blackmore at Holborn Court, London, and begins an obsessive love of the theatre, attending plays. He often practices impersonations for his friends.
1830: Dickens falls in love with Maria Beadnell. Her parents disapprove of the courtship and Maria is sent to Paris. The episode inspires the recurring motif of unrequited and unrealised love in many of Dickens' characters.
1832: Dickens works as a journalist, contributing to journals The True Sun and The Mirror of Parliament. He is promoted to becoming a parliamentary reporter, covering debates and election campaigns.
1833: Dickens' first piece of writing is published, a story in Monthly Magazine entitled A Dinner at Poplar Walk.
1834: Becomes a reporter for Morning Chronicle.
1835: Engaged to Catherine Hogarth, whose father is the editor of the Evening Chronicle, and whose house Dickens has previously visited with Walter Scott.
1836: Makes the acquaintance of John Foster, who becomes an advisor and later his biographer. Sketches by Boz (his pseudonym), his first long publication, is released.
1836: Dickens and Hogarth are married at St. Luke's Church in Chelsea, London. They make their family home at 48 Doughty Street in Bloomsbury.
1837: Dickens' first novel, The Pickwick Papers, is published. It's an instant success with accompanying merchandise sold and comedic books published. He becomes an editor for Bentley's Miscellany.
1838:Oliver Twist is published in serial form. It is the first Victorian novel to feature a child protagonist.
1839:Nicholas Nickleby is published in a single volume.
1840–41: Dickens serialises The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge in his magazine Master Humphrey's Clock, before publishing each as full single volumes in 1841.
1842: Dickens travels to North America, visiting Boston, New York City, Washington D.C., Richmond and then Canada, recreated in his travelogue, American Notes. He objects to slavery and expresses abolitionist sentiments, as well as speaking on international copyright laws and piracy.
1843: Visits the Cornish tin mines and the Field Lane Ragged School in Manchester, and is horrified by the working conditions of illiterate and impoverished children. Is offended by the release of the Second Report of the Children's Employment Commission. Plans a political pamphlet in response, and makes fundraising speeches later in the year.
A Christmas Carol is published at Christmas.
1844:Martin Chuzzlewit is published, the last of Dickens' picaresque novels. The Dickens family embark on a trip to Italy and Switzerland, travelling via Paris and Avignon. Charles regularly returns to holiday in France as a confessed Francophile and lover of French authors such as Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas. In December, the Christmas story The Chimes is published.
1845: With the success of The Chimes, Dickens publishes another Christmas story, The Cricket and the Hearth, in December.
1846: Dickens is appointed as the inaugural editor of Daily News, but resigns shortly afterwards. Writes The Life of our Lord, his only explicitly religious text, to convey the core teachings of Jesus Christ to his children while avoiding the perceived hypocrisies of Protestant evangelicalism and the Roman Catholic Church. The work remains a secret in Dickens' lifetime and is only published in 1934.
1847: With wealthy philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts, Dickens helps to establish the Home for Homeless Women, a shelter and reformative environment for teaching domestic proficiency. Hundreds of women will pass through the institution.
1848:Dombey and Sons is published, and at Christmas, The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain.
1850:David Copperfield is published.
1851: Dickens' father John, and infant daughter, Dora Annie, die. The Dickens family moves to Tavistock House in St. Pancras, London.
Dickens becomes more involved in amateur theatrical performances, often in adaptations of his own works and other plays, frequently for charitable causes. He performs for Queen Victoria, who has been following his success and has read his novels.
1853:Bleak House is published, arguably Dickens most ambitious work and a staple of urban Gothic literature. His first live performance reading of A Christmas Carol occurs at Christmas.
1854:Hard Times is published, and Dickens visits scenes of industrial unrest in Lancashire.
1855: Dickens volunteers to assist Liberal M.P. Austen Henry Lanyard's reforms for the Administrative Reform Association. Throughout his life he rejects numerous offers to run for political office himself.
1857:Little Dorrit is published. Following the Indian Mutiny, Dickens joins in criticism of the East India Company, although expresses basic support for Britain's presence in India.
1858: Having had ten children together, Dickens is publicly estranged from Catherine Hogarth. He attempts to have Catherine institutionalised, an act that draws shock from contemporaries such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Continues a relationship with Ellen Ternan, having met her the previous year during The Frozen Deep, a play written by himself and Wilkie Collins.
1858: Dickens keeps the Ormond Street Hospital for sick children from closure with profits from his popular reading tours throughout England, Scotland and Ireland.
1859:A Tale of Two Cities is published.
1861:Great Expectations is published.
1862: The first depiction of Pepper's Ghost, a theatrical stage illusion named after its designer John Henry Pepper, occurs during a performance of The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain.
1862: Two of Dickens' sons move to Australia, one becoming an M.P. in New South Wales. Dickens plans a reading tour of the continent, although eventually decides against it.
1863: Dickens' mother Catherine dies, and he is greatly affected. After a period of strained relations, he resumes his friendship with William Makepeace Thackeray.
1865:Our Mutual Friend is published. As a passenger in the Staplehurst rail crash in Kent he had famously returned to his carriage to retrieve the manuscript. He also attended to injured and dying passengers.
1867: Dickens makes his second visit to America, delayed from an initial plan to visit in 1861 due to the Civil War. Gives several performances as a literary celebrity, and attends dinners with writers including Ralph Waldo Emerson.
1868: Even in failing health, Dickens continues to conduct live readings from his novels and stories.
1870: Dies of a stroke. With his final work, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, unfinished, he is buried at Westminster Abbey.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
I am grateful to Dickens scholar Toby Pickett for his assistance in researching recent literary approaches to A Christmas Carol, for insights into the social and political circumstances of Dickensian England, and for input into the chronology of Dickens' life and work.
NOTES
*
Scrooge's origins are often disputed, but could have been inspired by Dickens' sight of a gravestone of a Scottish merchant of this name; or by James “Jemmy” Wood (1756–1836), Britain's first millionaire who was known for his stingy and frugal practices.
*
The precise nature of Scrooge's business is never made explicit, although it's inferred that he is a moneylender, a trader of commodities, or mercantile business owner.
*
In addition to many religious references, Dickens (a great student of literature) makes allusions throughout to works from Wordsworth, Shakespeare, and even to Greek and Arabian mythology.
*
The act replaced the previous Poor Relief Act of 1601 with drastic and widespread changes to curb perceived abuse of welfare systems, following the 1832 Royal Commission into the Operation of Poor Laws.
†
The period from July to September, the hottest of the year, coincident with the rising of Sirius, the Dog Star.
†
This Miser trope is emphasised in other Christmas stories by Dickens, including the character of Redlaw in
The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain
(1848).
*
Dickens wrote of his job: “it was a crazy, tumble-down old house… literally overrun with rats. Its wainscoted rooms, and its rotten floors and staircase… my work was to cover the pots of paste-blacking… two or three other boys were kept at similar duty down-stairs on similar wages.” Forster's
Life of Charles Dickens
(1872).
*
Dickens was a lifelong lover of the theatre, and as a young writer often attended West End productions.
*
Author of the bestselling
Self-Help; with Illustrations of Character and Conduct
(1859).
†
