When we meet Ebenezer Scrooge in the opening pages of A Christmas Carol, he is “a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone . . . a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner.” Muttering his catchphrase—“Bah! Humbug!”—he begrudges Londoners their annual Christmas cheer and generally exudes such nastiness that even seeing-eye dogs steer the blind away from him.
Long before that, though, Scrooge had been a child: a bookish boy, packed off to a decrepit rural boarding school by what author Charles Dickens hints is an abusive father, and abandoned there each year at Christmastime while other students visit home. When the reader learns this, the emotional trajectory of the story changes. The reader shifts from despising Scrooge to understanding him, or even rooting for him.
I return to A Christmas Carol every December—not in one of the countless film, television, radio, stage, or cartoon adaptations, but by rereading Dickens’s novella. This phantasmagorical tale of a mean old miser—confronted, on a seemingly endless Christmas Eve, by the consequences of his misspent life—never gets old.
