Student Question
What is the role of food in A Christmas Carol?
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Food plays an important role in A Christmas Carol as a symbol of well-being and generosity. Despite their limited means, the Cratchits’ positive attitude, regard for other people, and generosity are shown by their desire to share their modest Christmas meal. The connection between food and well-being is emphasized by the Ghost of Christmas Present’s sprinkling incense on poor people’s dinners. Scrooge is alienated from society, as he refuses to join a holiday meal, but he later finds redemption.
In Charles Dickins’s novel A Christmas Carol, food is important because it stands for the overall social and economic situation of the different characters. Food symbolizes general well-being or the lack thereof, as well as the generosity that even people of modest means extend to each other. Seen from a different perspective, people’s attitudes toward food can also make a humble meal enjoyable. The opposite side of this association is the withholding of food or not enjoying it, which stands for inappropriate withdrawal from society.
The meanings of food as well-being and generosity are embodied by the Cratchit family and their behavior, especially at Christmas time. Although they have relatively little food, they not only enjoy it but are also ready to share with others—even the mean-spirited Scrooge. The enjoyment of food is further connected with social well adjustment. This significance is indicated in one of the dreams, as...
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the Ghost of Christmas Present sprinkles a magical incense on the dinners of the poor people who walk past him and Scrooge. The relative concepts of having too little or enough are associated with differing frames of mind.
Anti-social behavior, in contrast, is associated with the refusal or withholding of food. For much of the novel, Ebenezer Scrooge lacks generosity of spirit. When invited, he refuses to join the Cratchits’ meal. As he is reformed, he becomes more openhearted as well as openhanded. His sharing food, symbolized by the huge turkey he sends to the Cratchits, stands for his reentry into normal human society.
What is the importance of food in A Christmas Carol?
The first mention of food in A Christmas Carol occurs in stave 1, "Marley's Ghost," when coldhearted miser Ebenezer Scrooge returns home on Christmas Eve from a day spent counting his money and berating his clerk, Bob Cratchit, at his London countinghouse. On his way home, "Scrooge took his melancholy dinner in his usual melancholy tavern." There's no mention of what Scrooge ate for his melancholy meal, but the context implies that Scrooge had dinner alone and that his meal was likely cheap, moderately filling for the price, and otherwise served its purpose of sustaining him from day to day.
The same can be said of the food next mentioned in the story, which is the "gruel" he sits down to eat in front of the fireplace in his home after he changes his clothes. Gruel is thin, watery, cooked cereal—such as ground oats, wheat, rye, or rice, or sometimes cornmeal—boiled in water or milk. Scrooge can certainly afford better food than this, but gruel is cheap, which appeals to his miserliness. For Scrooge, who has a slight cold, it also might be a kind of "comfort food" that reminds him of his early life at home when he was poor and, as Belle says later in the story, "content to be so."
In stave 2, "The First of Three Spirits," Mr. Fezziwig, to whom Scrooge was apprenticed in his youth, provides a generous Christmas Eve buffet for his warehouse workers and apprentices, his family, "the housemaid ... her cousin, the baker ... the cook ... the milkman," and the boy from across the street who Fezziwig suspects of not getting enough food to eat from his own master.
The buffet isn't particularly lavish, but it's better food than anyone other than the merchant-class Fezziwigs can afford on a daily basis. There was
cake, and there was negus, and there was a great piece of Cold Roast, and there was a great piece of Cold Boiled, and there were mince-pies, and plenty of beer.
The buffet is a big step up from the usual fare for the apprentices and warehouse workers and more than a big step up for the starving boy from across the street.
In stave 3, "The Second of the Three Spirits," the Ghost of Christmas Present brings with him enough food to fill an entire room in Scrooge's lodgings.
Heaped up upon the floor, to form a kind of throne, were turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch.
Neither the Ghost of Christmas Present nor Scrooge eats any of the food, so it must exist solely to display the plenteous cornucopia of food that's fit for a king or, in the case of Victorian England, fit for a queen.
In his travels through the streets of London with the Ghost of Christmas Present, Scrooge visits the poulterers (where he sees the prize turkey that he later buys and has delivered to the Cratchits), the fruiterers (where he sees rare and costly fruits and nuts), and other food shops and greengrocers. Dickens describes all manner of food on display in these shops, and his description is intended to instill a generous, expansive, festive spirit in the reader that's in direct contrast to Scrooge's "squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous" personality.
In stave 1, Dickens provides a contrast between the Christmas feast being held at the Lord Mayor's house—at which the upper-class attendees are sumptuously fed and their every need is fulfilled by "fifty cooks and butlers"—and the freezing men and boys in the streets just outside the Lord Mayor's Mansion House who are trying desperately to keep warm over an outdoor fire.
Dickens makes a similar contrast in stave 3 when he describes how the poor of London don't have any facilities for cooking their own food and must rely on the corner baker to warm and cook their Sunday dinners, which is likely their families' only cooked meal of the week.
The Cratchits' Christmas dinner is one of the focal points of stave 3. The Ghost of Christmas Present takes Scrooge to the Cratchits' humble home, where they watch the Cratchits enjoy their dinner of roast goose, sage-and-onion stuffing, mashed potatoes, and applesauce, and see them marvel at Mrs. Cratchit's plum pudding, which Bob Cratchit regards as "the greatest success achieved by Mrs. Cratchit since their marriage." Dickens doesn't mention it, but it was probably understood by his readers that the Cratchits' Christmas dinner likely cost half of Bob Cratchit's fifteen-shillings-a-week salary and that providing the dinner for their family required considerable sacrifices in other areas of Mr. and Mrs. Cratchits' lives.
After his meeting with the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in stave 4, "The Last of the Spirits," the newly-redeemed Ebenezer Scrooge, who vows to “honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year," finds it in his heart to buy the "prize turkey" for the Cratchits' Christmas dinner. At the time Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, a turkey was more expensive than a goose, and whereas Scrooge could afford to buy a turkey, particularly a "prize turkey," the Cratchits could only afford to buy a goose and perhaps only once during the whole year.
Near the end of A Christmas Carol, Scrooge invites Bob Cratchit to share with him "a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop," which is a type of mulled drink. It's a cordial, warm, and fitting end to this beloved Christmas story.