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When Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol it was a response to British social attitudes towards poverty, particularly child poverty, and wished to use the novella as a means to put forward his arguments against it and how people should change for the better especially the rich who dickens saw as hoarding wealth and not paying their workers a proper salary.
Scrooge, the main character of Dickens' A Christmas Carol is the human embodiment of the phrase 'humbug' however the miserly man after meeting several ghosts and achieving moral redemption. This is one of Dickens's reasons for writing this novella as he wanted to emphasize how big factory owners can always change their ways and start contributing to their worker's communities.
Dickens's description of Scrooge is unpleasant and shows to the reader how cold Scrooge is,' no warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him' Dickens use of pathetic fallacy to represent Scrooge's nature at the start and Dickens uses it as a metaphor for Scrooge's misanthropic behavior as at the beginning scrooge seems as he won't change and will never!
Dickens is writing about the factory owners of his time who tended to be old men who spent their whole lives in pursuit of wealth.
Scrooge is a miserly old person and incredibly stingy with his money, 'clerk came in with the shovel and the master predicted that it would be necessary for them to part' this indirect speech shows that Scrooge is not concerned with the well-being of his faithful employee and doesn't care if he is cold and uncomfortable. Dickens again wants to show similarities with the employers of his time who tended to pay their workers as little as possible to maximize their profits.
Scrooge's merry nephew visits to wish his Uncle a 'Merry Christmas' ' and Scrooge is unthankful and is very cumodnenly. 'Every idiot who goes about saying 'Merry Christmas' on his lips should be boiled alive with his pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart' This unpleasant response although comical, establishes his churlishness in rejecting Fred's offer for Christmas dinner. Dickens is trying to show how the employers of his day cared little about happiness and saw them as distractions from the real purpose of life which they saw as to collect the most wealth.
When Dickens uses the simile 'solitary as an oyster' he uses it as a simile An oyster lives alone at the bottom of the seabed this is similar to Scrooge who spends all day on his own and is very misanthropic preferring to eat is 'his melancholy dinner' alone in the 'Melancholy tavern' So when Dickens is uses oyster, to the reader that harsh and hard exterior we are sown can also indicate the existence of a jewel which is indeed the case in this novel. Dickens also wants the reader to question their behavior and see how even bad people can change for the better.
Once Scrooge encounters his past self he accounts completely differently to his behavior in stave one ''Good Havens' said Scrooge, clasping his hands together 'I was bred in this place. I was a boy here' This shift is used by Dickens to trigger the start of a night of transformation for Scrooge.
Eventually, the spirit takes Scrooge to a vision of his old boss, Mr. Fezziwig Scrooge defends Fezzwig's generoucity when he says, 'like his former self, not his later self' This suggests that Scrooge didn't always think money was more important than happiness. Dickens uses this to show how many of the big industrialists who ran the factories did not necessarily have the family prestige that many of the aristocrats had and that many had started as clerks or lower positions during the earlier stage of the Industrial Revolution.
When Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by the Ghost of Christmas Present he is shown just how ill tiny Tim is and how his family cannot afford to properly treat him on the salary Scrooge pays Cratchit. When visited by the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, Scrooge sees that Tiny Tim has died. Spirit,' said Scrooge, with an interest he had never felt before, 'tell me if Tiny Tim will live.'This, and several other visions, lead Scrooge to reform his ways as earlier in his life he would not care for the sickly boy and saw him as a waste of life. ''Are there no prisons?... And the Union workhouses?' At the end of the story, Dickens makes it explicit that Tiny Tim does not die and that it was thanks to Scrooge's transformation again suggesting that although the wages that the employers were paying were below what they needed to support their family and indirectly leading to children without food on their plates and unable to afford life-saving medicine they can always adjust their page and lead to standards of living increasing.
Since the introduction of Scrooge, we are shown that he is a very frugal, insular, and 'covetous' character, obsessed with his wealth and dreadful of losing it all. The text states that Scrooge 'wept to see his poor forgotten self'. Scrooge's fear is in the form of regret and remorse knowing that he has lost companions, a fiance, and a family. Fear itself encourages Scrooge to change his ways. Dickens wanted to get readers to consider the plight of the workers of his day and how inconsiderate people could do more to support those less fortunate; thus embodying the spirit of Christmas.
In conclusion in the story, Scrooge is visited by 4 spirits throughout the experience a dramatic change of heart occurs. Scrooge ends up becoming a merry, generous man who lives his life with others and celebrates the holidays with his family and friends this is fermented as in the penultimate chapter the word 'good' is mentioned no less than seven times this infers dickens message wished to spread that everyone can change for the good and be forgiven for mistakes of their past, as we
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