A Christmas Carol

“Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge’s name was good upon ‘Change for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.”

The novel’s abrupt opening line aims to startle the reader, and the paragraph afterward establishes a tone of facetious humor that creates a sense of intimacy between reader and narrator. The passage makes a joke in its implication that the reader might doubt that Marley is deceased (which the reader has no reason for doubt). However, given that Marley’s ghost will soon appear, this overemphasis on Marley’s death also serves as foreshadowing.

“Oh! but he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas.”

The author uses metaphor and hyperbolic (exaggerated) imagery to establish Scrooge’s character. By describing Scrooge’s white hair as a coating of frost (rime), he emphasizes that Scrooge is enclosed in a shell of frozen emotion. He creates a metaphorical zone of low temperature around himself, low temperature being a metaphor for emotional coldness. Scrooge appears old, stiff, and shriveled, but authorities on Dickens’s work estimate his age at no more than 57, implying that his inner chill has aged him prematurely.

“‘Christmas! What’s Christmas-time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, and not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books, and having every item in ‘em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will,’ said Scrooge indignantly, ‘every idiot who goes about with “Merry Christmas” on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.’”

Scrooge’s fixation on money allows him to see only Christmas’s associated expenses. More than that, he feels hostility toward those who appear to be happy, as if happiness itself is a threat to him.