Of all the memorable characters created by Charles
Dickens, Scrooge is probably the best known. In fact, his very name has become
synonymous with that of a cold-hearted miser. In his novella, Dickens portrays Scrooge
with words that are equally as familiar as his name--
"Bah!...Humbug!"
In Stave I, the
reader learns much about the personality of Scrooge, who does not even stop working when
his partner of many years, Marley, dies. Nor does he bother to paint over Marley's
name; indifferent to his absence, Scrooge even answers to his name if a client should
call him "Marley." Dickens describes him as
...a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone,
Scrooge! A squeezing, wrenching, gasping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and
sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret and
self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features,
ripped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait, made his eyes red, his
thin lips blue and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his
head, and on he eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature about
with him; he iced his office in the dogdays; and didn't thaw it one degree at
Christmas.
In a small cell
the clerk of Scrooge's countinghouse works where Scrooge can keep his eyes upon him.
Scrooge is so parsimonious that he
has a very small fire, but the clerk's fire was
so very much smaller that it looked like one
coal.
When his nephew enters
his business, heartily wishing him "A Merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!" Scrooge
gruffly replies, "Bah!...Humbug!" He tells his nephew to desist in his wishes or he
"will lose [his] situation," and he refuses his nephew's kind invitation to come to
Christmas dinner, as well, asking him why he has married and dismissing him by growling,
"Good afternoon!"
When two men enter, requesting charity
for the poor, Scrooge asks, "Are there no prisons?" and "no Union workhouse?" in which
the poor are confined. One of the men tells him that some would rather die than go to
the workhouse; to this, Scrooge dismisses them,
"It is not my business....It's enough for a man
to understand his own business, and not interfere with other people's. Mine occupies me
constantly. Good afternoon,
gentlemen!"
Finally, the
day draws to its close and Scrooge must release his clerk, Bob Cratchit, but not before
he grumpily says, "...you don't think me ill-used when I pay a day's wages for no work"
as he must allow the man a holiday on Christmas. Ordering the man to "Be here all the
earlier" the next day, Scrooge reluctantly lets the man go
home.
Clearly, Ebenezer Scrooge is a misanthrope who shares
no warmth with any man. As he dismisses his nephew, Scrooge
declares,
"If I could work my will,...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. He
should!"
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