A Christmas Carol Key Quotes

• In Stave 1, Scrooge tells the charity collectors that it would be better if the poor died so that it would “decrease the surplus population".
• In Stave 1, Dickens introduces the character of Scrooge as a man who is “as hard and sharp as flint” and “as solitary as an oyster”
• When Fred visits Scrooge in his office in Stave 1, he arrives “all in a glow” with “his eyes sparkl[ing] and his breath smok[ing].”
• Early in Stave 1, Fred praises Christmas and tells Scrooge that it is the one time in the year that people “open their shut-up hearts freely” and see “people below them” (the poor) as “fellow-passengers to the grave”.
• When Scrooge asks Marley’s ghost about the chains he is wearing, he tells him: “I wear the chain I forged in life.”
• When Scrooge tells Marley’s ghost that he was a successful businessman at the end of Stave 1, the ghost replies that “mankind was [his] business” and that work was merely “a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of [his] business!”
• When the Ghost of Christmas Past shows Scrooge his childhood self, “a solitary child, neglected by his friends”, Scrooge is shaken. “He said he knew it,” Dickens tells us. “And he sobbed.”
• After the break-up with Belle, Dickens describes the parting with young Scrooge very succinctly: “She left him, and they parted.”
• At the end of Stave 2, when Scrooge sees Belle with her children, he realises that her children could have been his, that they could have been “a spring-time in the haggard winter of his life.”
• When Scrooge is told that Tiny Tim will die if things do not change, Scrooge is overcome with grief, and the Ghost of Christmas Present conveys his (and Dickens’) condemnation of Malthusian attitudes to the poor: “Oh God!” he says, having repeated Scrooge’s words from Stave 1 back to him. “To hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust!”
• In Stave 3, Dickens takes several sentences to describe Fred’s laugh, and the wonder of it, concluding that “while there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good-humour.”
• Just before the Ghost of Christmas Present leaves, Scrooge meets Ignorance and Want, two horrible-looking children who are “yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish.”
• When the Ghost of Christmas Future first enters in Stave 4, he is said to do so “slowly, gravely, silently.”
• When Scrooge sees the body of the dead man (himself, as it turns out), the body is said to be “plundered and bereft, unwatched, unwept, uncared for”.
• When Scrooge revisits the Cratchits in Stave 4, after the death of Tiny Tim, the house is “quiet. Very quiet.”
• Before the Ghost of Christmas Future leaves, Scrooge vows to change, claiming he will “live in the Past, the Present, and the Future” from now on.
• In the end, Scrooge is said to have become “a second father” to Tiny Tim, who does not die.