A Christmas Carol flashcards
14 cards on A Christmas Carol: the key points, worked examples and the slips to watch. Swipe through them, or print them.
Card 1 of 14
A Christmas Carol
Building an argument
What big ideas can drive a whole essay on A Christmas Carol?
Answer it in your head, then turn the card over.
Building an argument
Key points
- Redemption: Dickens uses Scrooge's change to argue that even the coldest heart can be saved.
- Responsibility: the rich have a duty to help the poor, through generosity, not workhouses and prisons.
- Scrooge starts so extreme so his change is huge: if he can be redeemed, anyone can.
- Organise by idea, each paragraph drawing on moments from different staves.
“Mankind was my business”
The novella's message: caring for others is the real business of life.
Watch out
Walking through the story stave by stave is a retelling: let the plot serve as evidence for your argument.
A Christmas Carol
Form and structure
How do the novella's form and five-stave structure carry Dickens's message?
Answer it in your head, then turn the card over.
Form and structure
Key points
- A novella: short enough to read in one sitting, or aloud at Christmas, so its message spread fast.
- A stave is a verse of a song: five staves make the book a carol, meant to be shared.
- Three ghosts take Scrooge through past, present and future, step by step.
- It moves from a cold opening to a joyful final chorus: Stave Five undoes Stave One act by act.
Watch out
Naming the structure is not enough: explain what it makes the reader feel or expect.
A Christmas Carol
The narrator's voice
How does Dickens use his narrator to steer the reader?
Answer it in your head, then turn the card over.
The narrator's voice
Key points
- The narrator talks straight to us, like a storyteller by the fire, with jokes and asides.
- His humour makes us laugh at Scrooge early on, then care about him as he changes.
“Marley was dead: to begin with.”
A blunt, joking opening to a ghost story, in a chatty voice.
“Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it”
Even his love of the dark is about money: dry humour at his expense.
Watch out
The story does not tell itself: the narrator is a method, as worth analysing as any metaphor.
A Christmas Carol
Cold, warmth and pathetic fallacy
How does Dickens use cold and weather to show the state of Scrooge's heart?
Answer it in your head, then turn the card over.
Cold, warmth and pathetic fallacy
Key points
- Pathetic fallacy: the weather or setting reflects a character's feelings or a scene's mood.
- Cold and fog cling to the early Scrooge; light and warmth mark his thaw.
“No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him”
He is colder than the weather: the coldness is in his heart.
“A frosty rime was on his head”
Frost on his very body: a man frozen like winter.
“No fog, no mist; clear, bright, jovial”
The weather clears as Scrooge's heart does.
Watch out
Naming pathetic fallacy earns little: say what the weather shows about Scrooge.
A Christmas Carol
Scrooge in Stave One
How does Dickens's language present Scrooge at the start of the novella?
Answer it in your head, then turn the card over.
Scrooge in Stave One
Key points
- An asyndetic list of grabbing verbs makes his greed feel relentless and physical.
- Similes of hard, shut objects show a man closed off from everyone.
“a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!”
Every verb is about grabbing and holding on.
“Hard and sharp as flint”
Flint only sparks when struck hard: the ghosts will be the blow.
“solitary as an oyster”
Shut tight, yet an oyster may hide a pearl inside.
Watch out
Scrooge is not a real man: write about what Dickens uses him to show his readers.
A Christmas Carol
Stave Two: the Ghost of Christmas Past
How does the Ghost of Christmas Past begin to change Scrooge?
Answer it in your head, then turn the card over.
Stave Two: the Ghost of Christmas Past
Key points
- His lonely childhood makes us pity him and shows he can still feel: he weeps.
- Fezziwig's party reminds him a kind employer can make workers happy at little cost.
“A solitary child, neglected by his friends”
The lonely boy behind the cold old man.
“I should like to be able to say a word or two to my clerk”
After Fezziwig's, the first crack in his coldness.
“Another idol has displaced me”
An idol is a false god: money has replaced love.
A Christmas Carol
Stave Three: the Ghost of Christmas Present
How does the Ghost of Christmas Present use the Cratchits to change Scrooge?
Answer it in your head, then turn the card over.
Stave Three: the Ghost of Christmas Present
Key points
- The Cratchits are poor but loving, and Tiny Tim gives poverty a human face.
- The Ghost turns Scrooge's own cruel words back on him, and he is ashamed.
“tell me if Tiny Tim will live”
Asked with an interest he never felt before: he has begun to care.
“If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, the child will die”
Tim's fate now hangs on Scrooge changing.
“decrease the surplus population”
His own Stave One words, now aimed at a sick child.
A Christmas Carol
Stave Four: the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come
Why does the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come finally break Scrooge?
Answer it in your head, then turn the card over.
Stave Four: the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come
Key points
- It is silent and only points, like death itself, so Scrooge must work out the truth himself.
- Seeing his own neglected grave, he begs for the chance to change.
- The future it shows is shadows of what may be: it can still be altered.
“hear me! I am not the man I was”
He declares his change at his own grave.
“I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year”
Christmas becomes a way of living, not one day.
A Christmas Carol
Stave Five: the changed man
How does Dickens show that Scrooge's change in Stave Five is real and lasting?
Answer it in your head, then turn the card over.
Stave Five: the changed man
Key points
- Each act reverses Stave One: a turkey for the Cratchits, money for charity, a pay rise for Bob, Fred's party.
- His similes now pile up joy, where Stave One's list piled up greed.
“I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy”
Freed from his burdens, he is reborn with a child's joy.
“Scrooge was better than his word”
The narrator promises the change lasts.
“a second father”
What Scrooge becomes to Tiny Tim, who does not die.
A Christmas Carol
Context: the Poor Law and the surplus
Which Victorian ideas about the poor does Dickens attack through Scrooge?
Answer it in your head, then turn the card over.
Context: the Poor Law and the surplus
Key points
- The 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act sent many poor people to workhouses, made grim on purpose.
- Thomas Malthus argued population would outgrow food; Scrooge's "surplus population" echoes him.
- Dickens gives these views to Scrooge, so readers who share them hear them from the villain.
“Are there no prisons?”
He treats poverty as a crime to lock away.
“Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die?”
The Ghost's answer to the "surplus" idea.
Watch out
A paragraph on workhouses earns nothing alone: link it to why Dickens writes a moment the way he does.
A Christmas Carol
Context: Dickens's life and purpose
How did Dickens's own life and aims shape A Christmas Carol?
Answer it in your head, then turn the card over.
Context: Dickens's life and purpose
Key points
- When Dickens was a boy, his father was jailed for debt and he was sent to work in a blacking factory.
- Shocked by a government report on child labour, he planned a pamphlet, then wrote a story instead.
- Published in 1843, it was written to make comfortable readers see the poor differently.
- The lonely schoolboy of Stave Two draws on feelings Dickens knew himself.
Watch out
Use Dickens's purpose to explain a moment: "Dickens wants his readers to…" keeps context on the question.
A Christmas Carol
Ignorance and Want
What do Ignorance and Want represent, and why does Dickens make them children?
Answer it in your head, then turn the card over.
Ignorance and Want
Key points
- They stand for the lack of education and the poverty that Victorian society neglected.
- Children are innocent, so their suffering is society's fault, and they are the next generation.
- They are allegory: ideas given human form to carry Dickens's warning.
“This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both”
Want means poverty: the Ghost names the danger.
“most of all beware this boy”
An uneducated generation is the greatest threat of all.
A Christmas Carol
Generosity and responsibility
Who speaks up for generosity before Scrooge changes, and what do they show?
Answer it in your head, then turn the card over.
Generosity and responsibility
Key points
- Christmas is Dickens's shorthand for generosity, goodwill and family.
- Fred and the Cratchits are poorer than Scrooge, yet happier: Dickens asks which life is richer.
- Marley's Ghost shows that a selfish life is punished after death.
“a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time”
Fred has the Christmas spirit his uncle lacks.
“I wear the chain I forged in life”
His greed made the chain he carries for ever: a warning to Scrooge.
“God bless us every one!”
The poorest, sickest child blesses everyone, rich or poor.
A Christmas Carol
Embedding quotations
How do you weave short quotations smoothly into a Christmas Carol essay?
Answer it in your head, then turn the card over.
Embedding quotations
Key points
- Take a few words, not a whole sentence, and build them into your own sentence.
- Choose quotations with one word worth close analysis, such as "flint", "oyster" or "idol".
- Short quotations are quicker to learn and quicker to write in the exam.
A quotation woven in
Scrooge is "hard and sharp as flint", a man from whom no warmth can come without force.
"Flint" hints that only a hard blow, the ghosts, will strike a spark from him.
Watch out
A long quotation on its own line leaves you little to analyse: trim it to the words that matter.
Print these cards
Four cards to an A4 sheet, each the size of a standard A6 revision card.
One-sided
Each card prints on one face: the question at the top, the notes under it.
Two-sided
Questions on the front, notes on the back. Print double-sided and flip on the long edge, then cut along the lines.