A Christmas Carol

About This Book

London, Christmas Eve, sometime in the 1840s. The fog is so thick that the houses across the narrow courtyard look like ghosts, and inside a cramped counting-house an old moneylender named Ebenezer Scrooge is refusing, for the hundredth time, to let the holiday interrupt his work. His nephew comes by with an invitation. Two gentlemen come by collecting for the poor. His clerk asks, very carefully, whether he might have Christmas Day off. Scrooge says no to nearly all of it, and goes home alone to a dark set of rooms that once belonged to his dead business partner. That is where the strange part starts. Charles Dickens called his book a ghost story, and he meant it: something is waiting for Scrooge that night, and it has come a long way to speak with him. What follows is a single night of visitations that will take Scrooge out of his locked bedroom and into places, times, and lives he has spent decades refusing to look at. The book is short — Dickens divided it into five parts he called staves, the word for a verse of a song, because he wanted the whole thing to read like a carol. It moves fast, it is often very funny, and it is deliberately a little frightening. Read it the way audiences first heard it: out loud, near a fire, in December.

Almost every student already knows a version of this story from a movie, a cartoon, or a school play — which makes reading the original an unusually satisfying experience, because Dickens is stranger, funnier, and angrier than the adaptations let on. It is also a nearly perfect book for learning how a writer builds an argument through a character: every scene Scrooge is shown is chosen to work on him in a particular way, and readers can trace exactly where his defenses start to crack. At about a hundred pages, it is short enough to read closely rather than quickly, and its central question — what do we actually owe the people around us? — is one that middle school readers are already asking in their own lives.

Pre-Reading Discussion Questions

1. What do you already think you know about this story, and where did that version come from — a film, a cartoon, a play, a song? Write it down now so you can compare it to the book later.
2. Dickens calls his book a ghost story and divides it into 'staves,' meaning verses of a song. What would you expect from a story that is trying to be both a ghost story and a carol?
3. Is it possible for a person's character to genuinely change, or do people mostly stay who they are? What would it take to convince you that someone had really changed?
4. When you see someone asking for help, what goes through your mind? What reasons do people give themselves for walking past?
5. Who is responsible for taking care of the poorest people in a society — families, charities, employers, the government, or everyone? Defend your answer.
6. Think of a memory you would find painful to revisit. Why might being forced to look at your own past be an effective way to change someone's behavior?

Themes & Big Ideas to Track

• Money as a measurement: Scrooge evaluates people and events by cost and profit, and Dickens keeps testing whether that measurement actually captures anything worth knowing.
• Chains and weight: watch for images of things that bind, lock, or burden characters, and notice who forged each one.
• Warmth and cold: fire, fog, frost, and food appear constantly, and their distribution across the book is never accidental.
• Time as a teacher: the book insists that past, present, and future are all available to a person willing to look at them honestly.
• The word 'business': several characters use it, and they do not all mean the same thing by it.
• Sight and blindness: notice how often characters are described as seeing, refusing to see, or being shown something they would rather not look at.

Chapter-by-Chapter Study Guide

About the Author

Charles Dickens (1812-1870) was the most popular English novelist of his century, and he wrote from the inside about the poverty he described. When he was twelve his father was imprisoned for debt, and Dickens was sent to work long days pasting labels onto bottles in a shoe-polish factory — an experience he kept secret for most of his life and returned to, in disguised forms, in book after book. He began his career as a court and parliamentary reporter, then published fiction in monthly installments that readers followed the way people now follow a series, arguing about the characters between episodes. He was also a spectacular live performer who toured Britain and America giving dramatic readings of his own work, and A Christmas Carol was the piece he read most often.

Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in about six weeks in the autumn of 1843, and it went on sale a few days before Christmas that year. Britain was in the middle of the Industrial Revolution: cities were growing faster than housing, sanitation, or schools could keep up, and enormous numbers of children worked instead of studying. A law passed in 1834 had reorganized poor relief around the workhouse, a deliberately grim institution meant to make asking for help a last resort — which is why Scrooge's questions about prisons and workhouses in the opening scene would have landed on Victorian readers as a specific political position, not just general grumpiness. Dickens had recently read a government report on child labor in mines and factories and had visited a school for destitute children in London, and he originally planned to answer with a pamphlet before deciding that a story would strike, as he put it, far harder. He was right: the book sold out its first printing almost immediately, was pirated within weeks, and helped popularize a warmer, more family-centered, more charitable idea of Christmas that much of the English-speaking world still keeps.