How is Scrooge presented in A Christmas Carol?

How does Scrooge change across the novella?

A Christmas Carol is a novella (a short novel) in five chapters, which Dickens called staves. A stave is a verse of a song, which suits a book called a carol. Scrooge is at the centre of every stave, and each one moves him a step further from the man we meet on Christmas Eve.

In Stave 1 he is at his worst. He snaps at his nephew Fred for wishing him a merry Christmas and turns away two gentlemen collecting for the poor. Even his clerk, Bob Cratchit, is grudged a day off. That night the ghost of his old business partner, Jacob Marley, arrives in chains to warn him. In Stave 2 the Ghost of Christmas Past takes him back to his lonely childhood and to the Christmas party thrown by his kind old employer, Fezziwig. Then it shows him Belle, the young woman who ends their engagement because money now matters more to him than she does. Scrooge weeps, and the first crack appears.

In Stave 3 the Ghost of Christmas Present takes him to the Cratchits' Christmas dinner, and for the first time he asks about somebody else's welfare: will Tiny Tim live? Stave 4 is the turning point. The silent Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shows him a death that nobody mourns, and then his own name on a neglected grave. By Stave 5 he is a changed man. He sends the Cratchits a prize turkey without saying who it is from, and the day after Christmas he raises Bob's salary.

Notice the shape. Dickens spends four staves taking Scrooge apart and only one putting him back together, so the change feels earned. It also happens in a single night ("The Spirits have done it all in one night", Scrooge realises), which tells the reader that change is possible for anyone, starting now.

Which moments show Scrooge most clearly?

Stave 1, the opening description. Dickens introduces Scrooge with a pile of grabbing words: "squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous". He leaves out the usual "and", so the greed seems to go on for ever. Then comes a simile (a comparison using "like" or "as"): Scrooge is "Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire". Flint makes sparks when it is struck with steel, so the image says that nothing in his life has ever drawn warmth out of him. Dickens adds that "The cold within him froze his old features": the winter weather of the book lives inside him.

Stave 1, the charity collectors. When two gentlemen ask for a donation, Scrooge asks "Are there no prisons?" and says that poor people who would rather die than go to the workhouse "had better do it, and decrease the surplus population". The phrase sounds like something from an official report. It turns starving people into a number to be reduced, and Dickens makes sure we hear how cold that is. The line comes back to haunt Scrooge in Stave 3, when the Ghost of Christmas Present repeats it to his face.

Stave 2, the empty schoolroom. The Ghost of Christmas Past shows Scrooge "A solitary child, neglected by his friends", left behind at school over Christmas. The word "solitary" repeats the "solitary as an oyster" simile from Stave 1, and the echo joins the old man to the lonely boy. Scrooge's hardness starts to look like a wound as well as a fault. He sobs, and wishes he had given something to a boy who sang a carol at his door the night before. Memory makes him kinder almost at once.

Stave 5, Christmas morning. Scrooge wakes laughing and crying at once: "I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel". The repeated "I am as" tumbles out like a child's excitement, and the similes are the opposite of flint, light instead of heavy and heavenly instead of hard. By the end Dickens tells us he became "as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man" as the city had ever known. The repeated "as good a" rebuilds him role by role.

What context matters for Scrooge?

Context is AO3 in the mark scheme. (AO stands for assessment objective, one of the skills the marks are given for.) It earns marks when it explains why Dickens wrote Scrooge the way he did, not when it sits in a separate paragraph of history.

The Poor Law and the workhouses. The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 grouped parishes into unions that ran workhouses. The idea was that poor people who could work should only get help inside one, and life there was made deliberately harsh so that only the desperate would go in. Families were split up once inside. When Scrooge asks about "the Union workhouses" and "the Poor Law", he is naming real institutions that Dickens's first readers knew, and treating them as a good enough answer to poverty.

Malthus. In 1798 Thomas Malthus argued that population grows faster than the food supply, and his ideas were used to claim that helping the poor only made the problem worse. Scrooge's "surplus population" echoes that way of thinking. Dickens answers it by giving the surplus a face: Tiny Tim.

Dickens's own childhood. When Dickens was 12, his father was imprisoned for debt and Charles was sent to work in a blacking factory, sticking labels on pots of boot polish. He knew what it was to be a child left to cope alone, which helps explain the sympathy in the Stave 2 schoolroom. The book came out in December 1843 and was aimed at readers with money to spare. Scrooge is a warning to them, and his change is an invitation.

What might an exam question ask about Scrooge?

If you sit AQA, A Christmas Carol is in Section B of Paper 1. You answer one question on the novel: an extract is printed on the paper, and you write about it first and then about the novel as a whole. The question is worth 30 marks. This section carries no marks for spelling, punctuation and grammar, though clear writing still helps an examiner follow your argument. If you sit a different board, check how your paper sets the novel.

Examiners set a new focus every year, so learn the whole character rather than guessing. Two focuses worth practising: how Dickens presents Scrooge as cut off from other people, starting with an extract from Stave 1; and how Dickens presents Scrooge's fear in Stave 4, and what that fear does to him.

Here is a model paragraph on the first focus. Notice that it makes one clear point in its opening sentence and proves it with two short quotations that talk to each other:

Dickens presents Scrooge's isolation as both his choice and his wound. In Stave 1 the narrator calls him "solitary as an oyster", a simile that suggests a hard shell clamped shut against the world. Yet in Stave 2 the Ghost shows him "A solitary child, neglected by his friends", and the repeated word "solitary" asks the reader to see the miser and the lonely schoolboy as the same person. Scrooge's coldness is therefore something that happened to him as well as something he does. That matters to Dickens's purpose: if loneliness made Scrooge hard, then company and kindness can soften him, which is exactly what the final stave shows.

Key quotations to learn

Short quotations are easier to remember exactly and easier to weave into your own sentences. These six cover Scrooge from the first stave to the last.

• "squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous" (Stave 1): grabbing words with no "and", so the greed feels endless.
• "Hard and sharp as flint" (Stave 1): no "generous fire" has ever been struck from him.
• "decrease the surplus population" (Stave 1): cold, official-sounding words for letting poor people die.
• "A solitary child, neglected by his friends" (Stave 2): the lonely boy explains the lonely man.
• "I am not the man I was" (Stave 4): short, plain words for the turning point, spoken while he clutches the ghost's robe.
• "as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man" (Stave 5): the repeated "as good a" rebuilds him role by role.