Stave One Flashcards
First lines
Marley was dead, to begin with.
Old Marley was dead as a doornail.
Descriptions of Scrooge
A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner.
Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge!
He was hard and sharp as flint.
As solitary as an oyster.
Warning all human sympathy to keep its distance.
Scrooge and the weather
External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge.
His carried his own low temperature always about him.
Pathetic fallacy
It was cold, bleak, biting weather.
The fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole.
Meanwhile, the fog thickened.
Piercing, searching, biting cold.
Scrooge’s cruelty towards others
His clerk, who in a dismal little cell beyond, a sort of tank, was copying letters.
At the ominous word ‘liberality’, Scrooge frowned.
I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry.
Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?
‘If they would rather die,’ said Scrooge, ‘then they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population’
Scrooge’s view on Christmas
A time for finding yourself a year older and not an hour richer.
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 and Fred about each other
What right have you to be dismal? You’re rich enough.
What reason have you to be merry? You’re poor enough.
Fred’s description
He was all in a glow, his face was ruddy and handsome, his eyes sparkled
Fred’s view on Christmas
A kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time.
Reinforcement of the initial shock of the supernatural
There was nothing at all particular about the door knocker on the door.
To say that he was not startled, or that his blood was not conscious of a terrible sensation to which it had been a stranger since infancy, would be untrue.
The same face: the very same.
Scrooge’s day-to-day
Scrooge took his melancholy dinner in his usual melancholy tavern.
Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it.
Scrooge’s disbelief at Marley’s ghost
‘How now!’ said Scrooge, caustic and cold as ever.
There’s more of gravy than of grave in you, whatever you are.
Marley’s regret
I wear the chain I forged in life.
I made it link by link, yard by yard.
No rest, no peace. Incessant torture of remorse.
Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were, all, my business.
The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power for ever.
Marley’s warning
‘Or would you know,’ pursued the ghost, ‘the length and weight of the strong coil you bear yourself? It was full as heavy and as long as this seven Christmas Eves ago. You have laboured on it, since. It is a ponderous chain!’
I am here to-night to tell you, that you have yet a chance and hope of escaping my fate.
If that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death.
