A Christmas Carol Summary: Dickens's Ghost Story of Redemption
What A Christmas Carol is about
Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas in London on 19 December 1843, through Chapman & Hall, with illustrations by John Leech. It is short, around five chapters, which Dickens called staves, in keeping with the musical title.
The story opens on a cold Christmas Eve in London, seven years after the death of Ebenezer Scrooge's business partner, Jacob Marley. Scrooge is an ageing miser who has no use for the season. He refuses a dinner invitation from his nephew Fred. He turns away two men collecting money for food and heating for the poor. He allows his clerk, Bob Cratchit, Christmas Day off with pay, but only grudgingly, and only because custom demands it.
That night Marley's ghost appears at Scrooge's home, dragging heavy chains and money boxes forged over a lifetime of greed. Marley warns that Scrooge has one chance to avoid the same punishment. Three spirits will visit him. He must listen, or carry chains far heavier than Marley's own.
The Ghost of Christmas Past comes first, showing Scrooge his lonely boyhood at boarding school, his sister Fan, a party thrown by his first employer Mr Fezziwig, and his fiancée Belle, who ended their engagement when she understood he would never love her as much as he loved money. The Ghost of Christmas Present takes him through a busy market, into a miner's cottage and a lighthouse, into Fred's party, and into the Cratchit home, where the family keep Christmas on very little and where the youngest son, Tiny Tim, is seriously ill. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come says nothing at all. It simply shows Scrooge what is waiting.
The main characters
Ebenezer Scrooge is the centre of the book, a cold and solitary man whose name has since become a word in its own right. He is not a monster. The second stave makes that clear by showing the boy he was and the warmth he turned away from, first with Fan, then with Fezziwig, then with Belle.
Bob Cratchit is his overworked and underpaid clerk, a man whose household runs on affection rather than money. Tiny Tim, the youngest Cratchit, is cheerful and gravely ill, and the Ghost of Christmas Present tells Scrooge plainly that the boy will die unless the course of events changes. Fred, Scrooge's nephew, is the son of the dead Fan and keeps inviting his uncle to dinner year after year.
Jacob Marley is the warning. The three spirits are the method. And in one of the sharpest moments of the book, the Ghost of Christmas Present reveals two starving children hidden beneath his robe, named Ignorance and Want, and tells Scrooge to beware the first above all.
The themes
Two ideas hold the story together: the treatment of the poor, and the possibility that a selfish man can redeem himself. Dickens had visited the Field Lane Ragged School, one of several institutions for London's street children, and that visit helped prompt the book. Ignorance and Want are not decoration. They are the argument.
Money runs through everything. Marley's chains are made of cash boxes. Belle leaves because of a ledger. In the fourth stave, the people around a dead man's possessions weigh what they can sell them for. Set against this is Fezziwig's party, Fred's open door, and the Cratchit table, all of which cost little and are worth a great deal.
Academics still debate whether the book is a secular moral tale or a Christian allegory. The novella holds both readings comfortably.
How it ends (spoiler)
The third spirit shows Scrooge a funeral nobody wants to attend unless lunch is provided, servants selling a dead man's belongings to a fence, and a poor couple relieved by the death because it buys them time with their debts. When Scrooge asks to see tenderness connected with any death, he is shown the Cratchits grieving for Tiny Tim. Then the spirit shows him a neglected grave with his own name on the stone.
Scrooge wakes on Christmas morning alive and changed. He makes a large donation to the charity he refused the day before, sends a huge turkey anonymously to the Cratchits, and spends the afternoon at Fred's party. The next day he raises Bob Cratchit's pay, and he becomes something like a second father to Tiny Tim.
Why it still matters
The first edition sold out by Christmas Eve. Thirteen editions had appeared by the end of 1844. Most critics reviewed it well. It has never been out of print, has been translated into many languages, and has been adapted endlessly for film, stage and opera. Dickens began reading it aloud in public in 1849 and gave 127 further performances before his death in 1870.
It arrived as the British were reassessing Christmas, reviving carols and taking up newer customs such as cards and trees. Dickens drew on writers including Washington Irving and Douglas Jerrold, and on his own childhood. The book then shaped the holiday it described, helping fix family gatherings, seasonal food and drink, games and plain generosity as the point of the day.
