A Mean Ol’ Humbug

In his novel, A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens portrays Scrooge as the children of ignorance and want; these children are under the cloak of the Ghost of Christmas Present. "They were a boy and a girl. Yellow, meager, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostate, too, in their humility… 'This boy is ignorance. This girl is want'" (49). Scrooge only wants money from his life; it is all he cares about. He is ignorant towards any unnecessary spending of the money. Lastly' he ignores his families attempt to socialize with him to make him more affable.

On the first, Scrooge wants only his money as if he were the small boy.

Scrooge knew he [Marley], was dead? Of course he did. How could it be otherwise? Scrooge and he were partners for I do not know how many years. Scrooge was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend and sole mourner. And even Scrooge was not so dreadfully cut up by the sad event, but that he was an excellent man of business on the very day of the funeral, and solemnized it with an undoubted bargain (1).

In the above passage Scrooge is working. The day that he’s working is the day that his partner Marley died. Scrooge knew that he died, but he did not mourn this at all. Instead he worked through as though nothing happened. This idea is showing that Scrooge wants time for work rather than mourning his partner’s death. By not spending the time to mourn over his dead partner it shows his greed for the money.

“Do not be cross, uncle,” said the nephew.

“What else can I be” returned the uncle, “When I live in such a world of fools as this? Merry Christmas! Out upon merry Christmas! What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, and not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in �em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will,“ said Scrooge, indignantly, “every idiot who goes about with �Merry Christmas,’ on his lips, should be boiled with his pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should! (4)

Here Scrooge is calling out the people who celebrate Christmas. He is saying that Christmas is a waste of money, and that the people who celebrate are poor. Along with that idea he decides that the poor spend money they do not have. This idea once again shows that all Scrooge cares about is money, and nothing else seems else seems to matter.

Secondly, Scrooge is ignorant towards any spending that he sees �unnecessary’. The list that he sees as unnecessary is rather large. This includes giving money to a charity for the poor and coal for a fire, which warms his and his new assistant’s work place.

“Under the impression that they scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude,” returned the gentle man, “a few of us are endeavoring to raise a fund