A Christmas Carol Flashcards
Quotes showing Greed
-“We have no doubt his liberality is well represented by his surviving partner”
1. Portly Gentlemen to Scrooge. Irony. Scrooge is just as liberal and generous as his dead business partner, which is to say not at all!
-“A poor excuse for picking a man’s pocket every twenty-fifth of December!”
1. Scrooge to Bob Cratchit. Scrooge sees Christmas as a poor reason for him to lose money. At the beginning of the novella, he has forgotten that Christmas is a time for generosity and celebration.
-“darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it”
1. Narrator. Scrooge is miserly (stingy) and does not spend money unless he has to. He eats and lives cheaply. Although it is important to him to be successful in business, he does not use this money to
make his life any more comfortable.
-“I wear the chain I forged in life…”
1. Marley to Scrooge. Marley’s sins have resulted in him being cursed in death, with the chains that he is now trapped in having got longer and longer as he continued to live in a greedy and immoral way.
He is unable to find peace in the afterlife because of the sins he committed in life.
-“Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business.”
1. Marley to Scrooge. There were things Marley should have focused on other than making money, but he was unaware of this at the time and did not act accordingly. This has come back to bite him and he
warns Scrooge not to repeat his mistakes.
-“Another idol has displaced me… A golden one”.
2. Belle to Scrooge. Money has replaced Belle in Scrooge’s affections, leading her to break off their engagement.
-“the master-passion, Gain, engrosses you”
2. Belle to Scrooge. Belle says that Scrooge’s true passion is gain. This means that he always wants more and is never content with what he has.
-“His wealth is of no use to him. He don’t do any good with it. He don’t make himself comfortable with it”
3. Fred to his guests. Fred points out that Scrooge’s lifestyle does not help him or anyone else. Scrooge sees money as a commodity to be collected. He does not use it to make himself or others happier or to
bring about change
Quotes showing poverty, inequality, class and treatment of the poor
-“Many thousands are in want of common necessaries”
1. Portly Gentlemen to Scrooge. Thousands of people in Victorian England lacked basic essentials, including food and shelter.
-“Are there no prisons?”
“Plenty of prisons…”
1. Scrooge/Portly Gentlemen. Dickens’ father was sent to prison for debt, resulting in Dickens having to drop out of school and take a job and a blacking factory. Obviously prisons are usually reserved for
criminals; in some sections of Victorian society, poverty may as well have been a crime. The destitute were looked upon as if they had done something wrong and aspersions were made about their
character.
-“The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour then?”
“Both very busy, Sir.”
1. Scrooge/Portly Gentlemen. The Poor Law stated that poor people would be sent to a work house and made to work for food and shelter. They were often treated poorly and were made to work tirelessly
for a subsistence diet of very little food. For some, there was a choice to be made about starving to death quickly outside the workhouse or slowly within it.
-“If they would rather die… they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population…”
1. Scrooge to Portly Gentlemen. Scrooge is parroting the ideas of Thomas Malthus, who said that society was overpopulated and that the population would always exceed available resources. Malthus
believed that the population would self-regulate in order to survive and that this would happen naturally through some people having access to resources (e.g. food, shelter) and others not having this. It
was effectively an argument for natural selection, or ‘the survival of the fittest’. Dickens has Scrooge put forward these ideas to show how cruel these ideas sound he is critical of them.
-“There’s such a goose, Martha!”
3. The two young Cratchits to Martha. The children are easily impressed – this meagre goose is an unimaginable feast to them.
-“Its tenderness and flavour, size and cheapness, were the themes of universal admiration”
3. Narrator. Interesting that cheapness is put on a par with tenderness and flavour when judging the impressiveness of the goose. What could this say about the Cratchit family and their priorities?
-eked out by the apple-sauce and mashed potatoes
3. Narrator. The Cratchits use cheap foods to bulk out their meal and make it go further, showing how poor they are.
-nobody said or thought it was at all a small pudding for a large family. It would have been flat heresy to do so.
3. Narrator. The Cratchits are incredibly grateful for their Christmas meal. They would never criticise it or think of themselves as unlucky.
-“This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.”
3. The Ghost of Christmas Present to Scrooge. Victorian society has ignored and mistreated the poor. The Ghost gives an ominous warning of consequences to come if this continues.
-it was a happier house for this man’s death!
4. Narrator on a struggling family that owed Scrooge money. The only relief that they are able to find is in Scrooge dying as it buys them some time. A sad sign of just how desperate they are and how scared
they must have been about not being able to make their repayments
