A Christmas Carol Review

Who said,"I wear the chain I forged in life...I made it link by link...and of my own free will I wore it."

Jacob Marley

Who appears in Scrooge's door-knocker?

Jacob Marley's ghost

Describe Fezziwig

Jolly

City in which A Christmas Carol is set

London

Describe Scrooge's holidays at school

Lonely

Who said, "I wish I had him here. I'd give him a piece of my mind to feast upon and I hope he'd have a good appetite for it."

Mrs. Cratchit

What does Scrooge send the Cratchits for Christmas?

Prize Turkey

Who said, "Assure me that I may yet change these shadows you have shown me by an altered life."

Scrooge

Who asks Scrooge for a charitable contribution?

Two portly gentlemen

Who said, "He frightened everyone away from him when he was alive, to profit us when he was dead! Ha, ha, ha!"

the charwoman

Bob Cratchit

the clerk in the counting house who asks for a day off, with pay, on Christmas

Ghost of Christmas Future/Yet to Come

the final Christmas ghost who visit the main character

Ghost of Christmas Past

the first Christmas ghost who visits the main character

Mr. Fezziwig

the first man who the main character worked for ; every year he held a Christmas party with dancing and food for the whole office

Belle

the girl who the main character was engaged to

Topper

the guest at the main character's nephew's party who flirts with the women there

Jacob Marley

the main character's former partner who died seven years earlier and comes back as a ghost

Fred

the main character's nephew who invites him to Christmas each year

Ghost of Christmas Present

the second Christmas ghost who visits the main character

Fan

the sister of the main character

Ignorance and Want

the two children of man (a boy and a girl)

Tiny Tim

the youngest son of the clerk who works for the owner of the counting house

Why does Scrooge hope to catch Bob coming in late?

to raise his salary

Who said, "God bless us, Everyone!"

Tiny Tim

In Stave I, how does Scrooge treat the boy who sings Christmas Carols?

chases him away

On the day of Marley's funeral, what did Scrooge do?

conduct business as usual

What did Tiny Tim carry?

crutch

Why does Belle end her engagement to Scrooge?

Because Scrooge is consumed by greed

Who said, "Another idol has displaced me; and if it can cheer and comfort you in time to come, I have no just cause to grieve."

Belle

Who brings Scrooge home from school?

Fan

What ironic statement does the spirit make when Scrooge asks for help for the two children, Ignorance and Want?

Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?

What is Scrooge's typical response to "Merry Christmas"?

"Bah! Humbug!"

In what year was A Christmas Carol written?

1843

Themes - Christmas and Tradition

A Christmas Carol was published as a Christmas story, and takes the form of a Christian morality tale containing a moral lesson that the highly religious and traditional English population of Dickens' time would enjoy. Its structure, with five "staves" instead of chapters, is a metaphor for a simple song, with a beginning, middle and end. Dickens uses the idea of singing to connect the story to the joyful Christian traditions of the season, such as caroling, while at the same filling it with more serious, politically-minded themes. This theme has two aspects: Firstly, the festive, jolly Christmas atmosphere flourishes in the streets surrounding Scrooge's company office, and the ethos of the nativity story is embodied in characters like Tiny Tim, Bob Cratchit, and Scrooge's nephew - these characters are examples of goodness and charity, and show Scrooge the way to kindness. The love and strength of the Cratchit family despite their poverty shows the reader that the spirit of Christmas can defeat Scrooge's spirit of misery. At the same time, Dickens uses the seasonal period around Christmas to highlight the sort of unfair and crushing poverty that the Cratchit's face. The cold, bleak winter weather exacerbates the terrible privations poor families of the era had to face, and in presenting the poor in such extremes A Christmas Carol profoundly criticizes the laws, policies, and economic system that promote such poverty. In this way, by allowing Dickens to use the harshness of winter to portray the terrible difficulty of the life of the poor, Christmas served Dickens as a vehicle not just for showing Scrooge's transformation but to appeal to readers' Christianity as well in an effort to change a society that was organized in some ways that Dickens saw as being profoundly un-Christian.

Describe the second spirit

A giant dressed in green who sits on a throne of food

Who said, "I'll give you Mr. Scrooge, the founder of the feast"

Bob

Author of A Christmas Carol

Charles Dickens

Who is in the grave in Stave Four?

Ebenezer Scrooge

What is the Ghost of Christmas Present's throne made of?

Food

Who said, "I mean to give him the same chance every year whether he likes it or not, for I pity him."

Fred

Who said, "I told you these were the shadows of the things that have been...that they are what they are, do not blame me."

Ghost of Christmas Past

What is Scrooge's relationship with Tiny Tim at the end of the book?

He becomes a second father to him.

Why must Marley wander the earth?

He did not care for his fellow humans.

Why does Scrooge accept the visit of the third spirit?

He knows that if he is to change, he must accept help from the spirits.

On what grounds does Scrooge refuse to help the poor in Stave 1?

He supports the workhouses and prisons through his taxes

What does the third spirit tell Scrooge about Tiny Tim and his future?

He will not die if Scrooge changes his ways

What is Jacob Marley forced to drag about as a result of his sinful life?

Heavy chains forged from ledgers and lockboxes

With whom does Scrooge dine on Christmas

His nephew

Describe the ghost of Christmas yet to come

Hooded figure in black who does not speak

Themes - Greed, Generosity and Forgiveness

Scrooge is a caricature of a miser, greedy and mean in every way. He spends all day in his counting house looking after his money but is so cheap that he keeps his house in darkness, his fire small and allows no extravagance even on Christmas day. But we soon learn that he is the most impoverished character - he is lacking love, warmth and the spirit of Christmas, all of which make lives like Bob Cratchit's so worth living despite their hardships. The story's structure and Scrooge's character development are engineered so that as Scrooge becomes aware of his own poverty and learns to forgive and listen to his buried conscience, he is able to see virtue and goodness in the other characters and rediscovers his own generosity - he even becomes a symbol of Christmas in the final stave. Scrooge is remedied in the novella by the Christmas-conscious characters that surround him, including his own nephew and Bob Cratchit and his family, who show Scrooge in the Ghost of Christmas Present's tour the true meaning of goodness. All of the generous characters in the story are financially downtrodden but succeed in being good and happy despite their lot, whereas Scrooge needs to go through a traumatic awakening in order to find happiness. But the virtue that really ensures Scrooge's transformation is forgiveness - it is this key of Christian morality that saves him when the characters that he has always put down—Fred, Bob Cratchit—welcome him into their homes when he undergoes his transformation, giving Dickens' tale the shape of a true religious redemption.

Jacob Marley

Scrooge's partner

What does Scrooge promise the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come?

That he will honor Christmas

To whom does Scrooge send the Christmas turkey?

The Cratchits

Which of the spirits does not speak to Scrooge?

The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come

Themes - Family

The entrance of Scrooge's nephew Fred at the beginning of the story introduces another side to the miser. Scrooge is not unfortunate in the way of relatives - he has a family awaiting his presence, asking him to dinner, wanting to celebrate the season with him, yet he refuses. This is one of the important moral moments in the story that helps predict Scrooge's coming downfall. It shows how Scrooge makes choices to prolong his own misery. He chooses to live alone and in darkness while even poor Cratchit is rich in family. Scrooge's distaste for Fred's happiness is not just annoyance at the sight of merriness and excess, it is also motivated by bitterness towards marriage based on Scrooge's own lost love Belle, who left him long ago. In the story, cold and loneliness are set up in opposition to the warmth of family. Symbols of coldness such as Scrooge's empty hearth, refusal to provide heat for Cratchit, and keeping his own house dark to save money show Scrooge's cruelty and lack of connection. But family provides the antidote to this coldness. When Fred enters, the counting house suddenly warms up. Further, Cratchit's warmth, despite his lack of coal, and the togetherness and energy of his large family, show him to be one of the most fortunate men in the story. Scrooge does have a kind of family in his partner Marley, who is described at the beginning of the novella as fulfilling many roles for Scrooge before his death. The inseparability of their names above the firm's entrance shows how close they are—at least in business terms—and though they are bachelors they share their lives, and the suite of rooms is passed down like a family legacy from Marley to Scrooge. Ultimately, from Marley's warning and the visions provided by the ghosts, Scrooge does learn to appreciate and connect with Fred and the rest of his family, and to even extend that family to include the Cratchits.

Themes - Past, Present and Future - The Threat of Time

Three ghosts appear to Scrooge to show him how he is living sinfully and what the consequences will be if he doesn't choose to live a better life. Sins in Scrooge's past leading to his present misery and the continuation of that sin leading in the future to death, symbolized by the hooded figure. Each ghost shows Scrooge a vision of life gone wrong, set in a chronological path to destruction. The ghosts' appearance threatens ultimately the absence of time, what will happen after Scrooge's death if he continues down this path: the endlessly wandering the earth that Marley's ghost warned him was his fate. Time in the story is distinguished by several motifs: First, bells tolling and chiming fit into the story's song-like structure and also recur at key moments, reminding Scrooge of the time and of time passing. Second the chains that Marley shakes at Scrooge to scare him are a visual reminder of the endless prison sentence of purgatory awaiting Scrooge in the afterlife. Tradition is important for all of these characters - be it Scrooge with his obsessive money counting and nightly rituals or Cratchit with his love of Christmas - and the changing of the city during these industrial times threatens to break down all of these traditions (through the changing economy and poverty).

What does the spirit show Scrooge when he asks to see his future?

a grave

In Stave 5, what does Scrooge offer to a charity on Christmas?

a large sum of money

Ebenezer Scrooge

a selfish old man who runs a counting house who is known to say, "Bah humbug!"

What do the charwoman, the laundress and the undertaker's man bring to Joe?

a shirt, a blanket, and silverware from the dead man's house

In Stave 5, how does Scrooge's nephew treat Bob Cratchit, his clerk?

kindly

What did Marley wear?

long chain

Scrooge's fiance ends up

married to another man with a happy family

Who mourns Jacob Marley's death?

no one

What did Ghost of Christmas Present carry?

torch