A Christmas Carol

By Charles Dickens

Ebenezer Scrooge is a London man of business, a miser with no use for charity or for Christmas, who has kept his counting-house alone since his partner Jacob Marley died seven years ago on that same night. On Christmas Eve he turns down his cheerful nephew's invitation to dinner, sends away two gentlemen collecting for the poor with the suggestion that the prisons and workhouses will do, and only grudgingly allows his underpaid clerk, Bob Cratchit, the next day off. That night, alone in his gloomy rooms, he is visited by Marley's ghost, bound in a chain of cash-boxes, keys and ledgers forged in his lifetime, who warns Scrooge that he still has a chance of escaping the same fate, and that three spirits will come to him. Charles Dickens's short novel, published in December 1843, is told in five staves, like a carol.

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Guides

• Chapter-by-chapter recap of A Christmas Carol
• A Christmas Carol character guide

Genres: classics, literary-fiction, politics, short-stories, social-sciences

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