A Christmas Carol Analysis

When the Real World Ain't So RealWhatever we make of the Christmas ghosts and the adventures Scrooge has with them (Is he hallucinating them because guilt has finally gotten to him? Are they actual...

There's something a little bit screwy with the narrative voice of this novella. No, really. Usually, when you have a third person limited omniscient narrator, readers are dealing with a voice that...

Back in the day, when the two Grimm brothers set out to collect and write down the folk tales that peasants told in the German countryside, they were kind of shocked at the for-adults-only nature o...

The tone of this novella really, really shifts from scene to scene, and it is never subtle. As tones go, this one's a bull in a china shop. Mostly, the tone we get depends on whose story we are hea...

It's kind of funny that in a novella about the journey of the protagonist from point A (hating people, being a miser) to point B (wanting human companionship, being generous), the narrator spends t...

You guys, just look at this thing. This title just piles contradiction on top of contradiction! How? Let us count the ways. First of all, we've got the paradox that Dickens claims that the story is...

You know what's great about the endings of Victorian novels? They are usually just a total exercise in wish fulfillment. However much some authors grumble about the predictability of the presents-a...

Sure, there's a little bit of old timey language, and it's probably helpful to have a sense that without the charitable donations of Scrooge and other rich folks the poor people of the time would h...

Bah! Humbug!Scrooge lives an angry and miserly existence, hoarding his money and rejecting the positive emotions of the Christmas season. He's a big ol' bummer.Pesky Christmas LoversScrooge's bitte...

In his old age, Scrooge has become a reclusive, hoarding miser—he hates paying his clerk, he refuses to socialize with the only family member he has left, and he lives in an isolated non-reside...

Scrooge is angry, snappish, mean, miserly, and hates Christmas and people who are happy. No one that he knows can change him.A ghost and three spirits take him here and there to show him scenes fro...

Dickens wrote this thing in six weeks, in a mad rush to get it to press before the Christmas market. He was pretty desperate to recoup the losses from Martin Chuzzlewit, and boy did he ever succeed...

Yeah, sorry, guys, this thing is almost totally squeaky clean. The only even very mildly suggestive scene happens during the party at Fred's house, when one of his friends is "it" during a game of...

"God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" (1.69)One Thousand and One Nights (2.57)"Valentine and Orson" (2.57)Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (2.59)"Sir Roger de Coverley," a country dance (2.94)Workhouses for...