Discussion Topic
Scrooge's Personality and Past Influences in A Christmas Carol
Summary:
In Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge's personality in Stave 1 is shaped by his past experiences. His lonely childhood at boarding school, the loss of his beloved sister Fan, his apprenticeship under the kind Fezziwig, and his broken engagement due to greed have all influenced his bitter, miserly nature. These experiences led him to prioritize wealth over relationships, resulting in a life of isolation and discontent. The story's ghosts aim to rekindle his lost humanity and compassion.
How have Scrooge's past experiences influenced his behavior in A Christmas Carol?
The reader finds out through Scrooge's visits to Christmases past that Scrooge was a very lonely little boy who wasn't shown much love. He is alone most days at school, although there are certain characters who do show him affection, kindness, and acceptance--the characters he imagines out of Ali Baba and Robinson Crusoe as well as his little sister, Fan, and his former employer, Mr. Fezziwig. Through these memories, Scrooge realizes that it takes very little money to make others happy--the parties that Fezziwig threw for his employees is the perfect example of this--and we see the icy shell of Scrooge beginning to melt.
The visits to Christmases present and future focus on Tiny Tim and his disease and the death of Scrooge himself, which no one really mourns. The small and emaciated figure of Tiny Tim touches Scrooge in such a way that he inwardly vows to do something about...
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it...in his change of character and outward show of feeling toward his fellow man--the boy who gets money to buy the biggest turkey, the Christmas dinner for the Cratchit family, and Scrooge's attendance at his nephew's dinner party--ensures that he will be a man whose death is mourned and who will be missed more than just someone whose bed curtains are torn down and whose clothes are collected and sold by the servants of the house.
Scrooge's past is not one to be proud of...if his change is genuine, he deserves a second chance and forgiveness.
What best explains the effect of Scrooge's personality in A Christmas Carol?
The effect of Scrooge's personality is to make life hard for people around him. He underpays his clerk, Bob Cratchit, so that Bob can't afford medical care for his sick son, Tiny Tim, and his family lives in poverty. He won't even give Bob enough coals for the fire to be warm as he works. To Dickens, it is men like Scrooge, mean and miserly, who spread misery and suffering throughout society by their lack of generosity. They value money over people, and so people go hungry and cold. They have forgotten the importance of human relationships. To correct this problem in Scrooge, the various ghosts try to show Scrooge how important family, friends, and other people really are.
As for what made Scrooge the way he is, Scrooge's fiancee, as she breaks off the relationship, explains that he fears too much being without money. Because of his fear of not having enough money, he has made money his goal in life. It has become all-important. The effect of this is that he doesn't love her anymore. She explains this in the following passage:
"Another idol has displaced me; and if it can cheer and comfort you in time to come, as I would have tried to do, I have no just cause to grieve.”
“What idol has displaced you?” he rejoined.
“A golden one.”
“This is the even-handed dealing of the world!” he said. “There is nothing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!”
“You fear the world too much,” she answered, gently. “All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach. I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one by one, until the master-passion, Gain, engrosses you. Have I not?”
How does Scrooge's past in A Christmas Carol explain his stinginess and ill-temper?
When the Ghost of Christmas Past makes the first stop on the journey, Scrooge is reminded of a Christmas when the fields all around his school were "so full of merry music, that the crisp air laughed to hear it." Yet not every boy is rejoicing, for one boy remains inside the school, forgotten: Scrooge himself. The Ghost reminds Scrooge of this lonely child and "Scrooge said he knew it. And he sobbed." Scrooge goes inside the school and watches this solitary boy reading alone, and it stirs a sadness that he has forgotten in later years—the sadness of a boy he used to be.
The Ghost makes time pass quickly, and suddenly Scrooge is an older boy; his sister Fan rushes into the room to tell him that he is allowed to come home for Christmas this year because their father is much kinder than he used to be. Scrooge is reminded of the tender relationship he had with his sister who has died since, leaving behind one child: the nephew who visited him earlier and whom Scrooge sent away.
Scrooge is then taken to a festive Christmas spent with Fezziwig full of merriment and laughter. He remembers how it felt to enjoy the company of others, participating in dances and rolling in laughter. Scrooge fully enjoys the scene before him, and the Ghost reminds him that it seems such a "small" matter, not costing Fezziwig much. And Scrooge has a revelation:
"He has the power to render us happy or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome; a pleasure or a toil. Say that his power lies in words and looks; in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to add and count them up: what then? The happiness he gives, is quite as great as if it cost a fortune.”
He suddenly considers how his own actions have impacted Bob Cratchit and wishes he could speak to him at that moment.
But over the years, Scrooge allows his employment to become the most important thing in his life, and he loses sight of the laughter and festivities and becomes solely focused on acquiring more wealth. Thus, his next memory is of having his engagement broken off because of his guiding quest for monetary gain. In this conversation, his fiance tells him:
"But if you were free to-day, to-morrow, yesterday, can even I believe that you would choose a dowerless girl – you who, in your very confidence with her, weigh everything by Gain: or, choosing her, if for a moment you were false enough to your one guiding principle to do so, do I not know that your repentance and regret would surely follow? I do; and I release you. With a full heart, for the love of him you once were.”
Scrooge doesn't even try to stop her because he knows that she speaks the truth; he is more concerned with wealth than with love.
His childhood is plagued by loneliness. His beloved sister dies, and he has consistently pushed away her only child. The joy he initially finds in his employment is gradually eroded by a relentless pursuit of wealth, leaving him alone by his own choices. Scrooge is a character who finds himself alone through no fault of his own in childhood but who makes the choice to live a life of bitter solitude in later years, and that has eroded his hope of any joy.