A Christmas Carol in Prose; Being a Ghost Story of Christmas
Charles Dickens
A Christmas Carol in Prose; Being a Ghost Story of Christmas
4.09from 961,637 ratingson Goodreads
Ebenezer Scrooge works his clerk cold, refuses his nephew's invitation and tells the men collecting for the poor that there are prisons. That night his dead partner arrives in chains to warn him, and three spirits take him through his own Christmases — past, present, and one that need not happen. He is asked to look, that is all.
About the book
Published a week before Christmas 1843 and sold out by Christmas Eve, A Christmas Carol takes one night to reform a man who has spent a lifetime refusing. Ebenezer Scrooge keeps his clerk on a single coal, dismisses his nephew’s invitation, and tells two gentlemen collecting for the poor that the workhouses are still open. That night his dead partner Jacob Marley arrives dragging the chain he forged in life, and three spirits take him through the Christmases he has had, the one going on without him, and one that has not happened yet. Dickens wrote it in six weeks, in anger at a parliamentary report on child labour in the mines, and paid for the printing himself. The book did more than any pamphlet could have, and a good part of how Christmas is now kept in the English-speaking world — the family dinner, the charity, the word humbug — comes out of it.
Characters
Ebenezer Scrooge — Protagonist
A grasping, solitary old money-lender who has made a virtue of wanting nothing from anybody.
Bob Cratchit — Clerk
Scrooge’s underpaid clerk, who keeps Christmas on fifteen shillings a week and a family of six.
Jacob Marley — Ghost
Scrooge’s dead partner, returning in chains to warn him that the same weight is already made.
The Ghost of Christmas Past — First spirit
A strange, shifting figure who takes Scrooge back to the schoolboy nobody came for.
The Ghost of Christmas Present — Second spirit
A giant crowned with holly, showing the day being kept in houses Scrooge never enters.
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come — Third spirit
A silent hooded shape that points, and answers no question but the one Scrooge is afraid to ask.
Tiny Tim — Cratchit’s son
Bob Cratchit’s youngest, lame and ill, whose survival depends on things his father cannot afford.
Fred — Scrooge’s nephew
Scrooge’s nephew, who invites him to dinner every year and is refused every year without taking offence.
About the author
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) was the defining English novelist of the Victorian age and, in his own lifetime, its most famous writer. When his father was imprisoned for debt the twelve-year-old Dickens was sent to work in a blacking factory, and the experience runs under everything he wrote about childhood, poverty and institutions that fail the people in them. Publishing in monthly instalments, he wrote for an audience that read each part as it appeared, which is part of why his books are built of cliffhangers and crowds of minor characters nobody forgets. His novels include Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Great Expectations and A Christmas Carol.