A Christmas Carol Key Quotes Flashcards
‘Scrooge was his sole…
Stave 1
‘Scrooge was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend, and sole mourner.’ - Shows how lonely Scrooge and Marley were; isolated by their obsession with money. Adjective ‘sole’
‘Solemnised it with…’
Stave 1
‘Solemnised it with an undoubted bargain’ - Scrooge was happy the funeral was cheap
‘Hard and….
Stave 1
‘Hard and sharp as flint’ - The adjective ‘hard’ suggests that Scrooge lacks warmth, empathy and compassion while the adjective ‘sharp’ suggests pain and severity, implying that Scrooge has no mercy towards others.
Scrooge has the potential to release the warmth that he is capable of producing later on in the play, when helped by the figurative light from the Ghost of Christmas Past’s candle flame, or the warmth of Fezziwig or Fred towards Scrooge. This parallels the simile of Scrooge being as ‘solitary as an oyster,’ with the metaphorical pearl inside the oyster representing hope for Scrooge. These are effective uses of foreshadowing used by Dickens.
‘Secret, and self-contained and…’
Stave 1
‘Secret, and self-contained and solitary as an oyster’ - This simile suggests he is shut up, tightly closed and will not be prised open except by force. However, an oyster might contain a pearl, so it also suggests there might be good buried deep inside him, underneath the hard, brittle shell.
‘He carried his own…’
Stave 1
‘He carried his own low temperature always about with him’. Here, Dickens’s use of metaphor emphasises Scrooge’s cold-hearted nature and attitude towards others.
‘Bah!…’
Stave 1
‘Bah! Humbug’ - phrase shows grumpy nature of Scrooge
‘Scrooge had…’
Stave 1
‘Scrooge had a very small fire, but the clerk’s fire was so very much smaller that it looked like one coal.’ - shows how selfish and cruel Scrooge is, his lack of generosity and care
‘Are there no…’
‘Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses’ - cyclical (said later in the play) - used to show where Scrooge believes the poor people belong, suggesting that he believes his status suggests that poverty is not directly relevant to him, and that nothing to do with the poor matters, cruel, in Scrooge’s eyes, the poor don’t need help
Context - Dicken’s purpose in writing the novel is to alert the Victorian audience to the suffering of the poor and prove the audience
‘If they would rather die…’
‘If they would rather die, they had better do it and decrease the surplus population’ - demonstrates that he has no sympathy for the poor and is capitalist. Scrooge sees the poor as simply a burden on society, who are responsible for their own condition and furthermore not deserving of charity - inhumane
Scrooge is complaining about there being too much population yet out of all those hundreds and thousands of people he has zero - irony
‘I wear the chain I forged in life…’
‘I wear the chain I forged in life…The chain was made up of cash boxes…ledgers…heavy purses’ - suggests he did something while he was living that led him to be punished in death by wearing a chain. The chain is a symbol of what you do the; good and the bad
‘Mankind was…’
‘Mankind was my business’ - Dickens uses this metaphor to express what is to be truly valued throughout life
‘I am as…’
‘I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy, I am giddy as a drunken man’ - leads the reader to infer that he has cast off the chains of his earlier way of life, repetition of ‘I am’ as if someone is trying to convince themselves and comes to the realisation that he is those things as he has not felt them before
‘His wealth is of…’
‘His wealth is of no use to him. He don’t do any good with it.’ - We see how others view our protagonist. In a capitalist society wealth is viewed predominantly for your own benefit but this is not what everyone believes.
Nobody likes Scrooge they view him as a lost cause and that is why when he changes it is even more of a bigger deal
‘The boy is…’
‘The boy is Ignorance. The girl is Want.’ - boy represents society. Society is ignorant of the struggles of the lower class, they turn a blind eye. The lower class wants basic needs. Dickens picks the two most innocent beings in
society a young girl and a young boy. A young girl is probably the most innocent thing that exists in society so Dickens is doing pulling on the chords of Scrooge’s heart.
LISTING IN CRATCHIT HOUSE
Opposite of capitalism, everyone works together nothing can defeat them because they’re a unit they might not have money but they have something that is hard to buy - love
