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A Christmas Carol - character study of Scrooge Essay

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A Christmas Carol - character study of Scrooge "A Christmas Carol" “Scrooge! A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner!” Scrooge is the main character in the novel ‘A Christmas Carol’. At the beginning of the novel he is a brutal, evil, pitiless, cold-hearted man, but subsequent to meeting three spirits, Scrooge regrets his life and decides he needs to alter it. The main theme Charles Dickens conveys through the story is redemption; this is significant especially in the Victorian era, whilst there was an immense gap between the prosperous and the inadequate. Dickens uses Scrooge (a rich, greedy business man) to direct his novel to the very rich people, and to exhibit how money can impede your …show more content…

H e is portrayed as “Hard and sharp as a flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire”; he is “secret and self-contained”. Dickens depicts Scrooge as a lonely sad person “Solitary as an oyster”, he wants to make Scrooge out to be a very malicious, malevolent, cruel character, so that it would make the transformation much more dramatic. Dickens perceives Scrooge as he saw rich people when he was living in poverty. Scrooge is very harsh on his clerk, Bob Cratchit; he treats him like a slave. Scrooge keeps the coal-box in his own room so the clerk is not able to replenish his fire whenever he wants to. This shows that Scrooge is very greedy; he would rather let his employee freeze to death than consume some money to keep warm. When Bob Cratchit asks for Christmas day off, Scrooge is quite spiteful “You’ll want all day tomorrow I suppose?” The Clerk observes that it is only once a year, but Scrooge is merely concerned about losing money, “A poor excuse for picking a man’s pocket every twenty-fifth of December”. When Scrooge’s nephew comes to visit Scrooge, he is very cheerful and wishes Scrooge “Merry Christmas, uncle, God save you!” but as usual Scrooge replies “Bah!...Humbug!”. We can already see that he’s not fond of Christmas. Scrooges nephew attempts to persuade

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