Scrooge then apprenticed at the warehouse of a jovial and generous master, Mr. She later died after giving birth to Fred. When his beloved sister Fan came to take him home one Christmas, this became Scrooge's one happy childhood memory. These visions establish that Scrooge's unloving father placed him in a boarding school, where at Christmas he remained alone while his schoolmates returned home to their families.

The first spirit then visits Scrooge, The Ghost of Christmas Past, who shows Scrooge visions of his early life. Marley tells Scrooge that he will be visited by three spirits, hoping that he will mend his ways if he does not, Marley warns, Scrooge will wear even heavier chains than his in the afterlife. That night, Scrooge is visited by Marley's ghost, who is condemned to walk the world forever bound in chains as punishment for his greed and inhumanity in life. He also refuses his nephew Fred's invitation to Christmas dinner and denounces him as a fool for celebrating Christmas. When two men approach him on Christmas Eve for a donation to charity, he sneers that the poor should avail themselves of the treadmill or the workhouses, or else die to reduce the surplus population. Most of all, he detests Christmas, which he associates with reckless spending. Despite having considerable personal wealth, he underpays his clerk Bob Cratchit and hounds his debtors relentlessly while living cheaply and joylessly in the chambers of his deceased business partner, Jacob Marley. secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.' He does business from a Cornhill warehouse and is known among the merchants of the Royal Exchange as a man of good credit. Scrooge's last name has entered the English language as a byword for greed and misanthropy, while his catchphrase, ' Bah! Humbug!' is often used to express disgust with many modern Christmas traditions.Ĭharles Dickens describes Scrooge as 'a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint. The tale of his redemption by three spirits (the Ghost of Christmas Past, the Ghost of Christmas Present, and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come) has become a defining tale of the Christmas holiday in the English-speaking world.ĭickens describes Scrooge thus early in the story: '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.' Towards the end of the novella, the three spirits show Scrooge the errors of his ways, and he becomes a better, more generous man. At the beginning of the novella, Scrooge is a cold-hearted miser who despises Christmas.

Ebenezer Scrooge ( / ˌ ɛ b ɪ ˈ n iː z ər ˈ s k r uː dʒ/) is the protagonist of Charles Dickens's 1843 novella A Christmas Carol.

A christmas story charles dickens