A Christmas Carol
On Christmas Eve, the miser Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by the ghost of his old partner Marley and by three spirits, who show him Christmases past, present and yet to come. By Charles Dickens (1843). A public-domain classic.
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How it begins MARLEY was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail. Keep reading →About this story
Ebenezer Scrooge is a rich, tight-fisted old man who hates Christmas. On Christmas Eve he is visited by the ghost of his dead partner, Jacob Marley, who warns him that three more spirits are coming. Over the night they take him through his past, his present and what is yet to come.
Charles Dickens wrote it in a few weeks and it was published on 19 December 1843. It sold out within days, and a great deal of what we now associate with a traditional Christmas, from the greeting “Merry Christmas” to the idea of the holiday as a time for charity, owes something to it. Dickens called its five chapters staves, as in a song.
- Themes
- Generosity, regret, change, how we treat the poor
- Good for
- A seasonal read for December; reading aloud over a few evenings
- Worth noticing
- What each of the three spirits shows Scrooge, and how his replies to them change as the night goes on.
