Ebenezer Scrooge


Ebenezer Scrooge is the protagonist of Charles Dickens' 1843 novella, A Christmas Carol. At the beginning of the novella, Scrooge is a cold-hearted miser who despises Christmas. The tale of his redemption by three spirits has become a defining tale of the Christmas holiday in the English-speaking world.
Dickens describes Scrooge thus early in the story: "The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice." Towards the end of the novella, Scrooge is transformed by the spirits into a better person who changed his ways to become more friendly and less miserly.
Scrooge's last name has come into the English language as a byword for stinginess and misanthropy, while his catchphrase, "Bah! Humbug!" is often used to express disgust with many modern Christmas traditions.

Description

Dickens describes Scrooge as "a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint,… secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster." He does business from a warehouse and is known among the merchants of the Royal Exchange as a man of good credit. Despite having considerable personal wealth, he underpays his clerk and hounds his debtors relentlessly, while living cheaply and joylessly in the chambers of his deceased business partner, Jacob Marley. Most of all he detests Christmas, which he associates with reckless spending. When two men approach him on Christmas Eve for a donation to charity, he sneers that the poor should avail themselves of the treadmill or the workhouses, or else die to reduce the surplus population.
Flashbacks of Scrooge's early life show that his unkind father placed him in a boarding school, where at Christmas-time he remained alone while his schoolmates traveled home. He then apprenticed at the warehouse of a jovial and generous master, Fezziwig. He proposed to a woman named Belle and dedicated himself to making enough money to rise out of poverty, but his fiancée was disgusted by his obsession with money and left him one Christmas, eventually marrying another man. The present-day Scrooge reacts to these memories with a mixture of nostalgia and deep regret.
After the three visiting spirits warn him that his current path brings hardship for others and shame for himself, Scrooge commits to being more generous. He accepts his nephew's invitation to Christmas dinner, provides for his clerk, and donates to the charity fund. In the end, he becomes known as the embodiment of the Christmas spirit.

Origins

Several theories have been put forward as to where Dickens got inspiration for the character.
Kelly writes that Scrooge may have been influenced by Dickens's conflicting feelings for his father, whom he both loved and demonised. This psychological conflict may be responsible for the two radically different Scrooges in the tale—one a cold, stingy and greedy semi-recluse, the other a benevolent, sociable man. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, a professor of English literature, considers that in the opening part of the book covering young Scrooge's lonely and unhappy childhood, and his aspiration for money to avoid poverty "is something of a self-parody of Dickens's fears about himself"; the post-transformation parts of the book are how Dickens optimistically sees himself.
Scrooge could also be based on two misers: the eccentric John Elwes, MP, or Jemmy Wood, the owner of the Gloucester Old Bank who was also known as "The Gloucester Miser". According to the sociologist Frank W. Elwell, Scrooge's views on the poor are a reflection of those of the demographer and political economist Thomas Malthus, while the miser's questions "Are there no prisons?... And the Union workhouses?... The treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?" are a reflection of a sarcastic question raised by the reactionary philosopher Thomas Carlyle, "Are there not treadmills, gibbets; even hospitals, poor-rates, New Poor-Law?"
There are literary precursors for Scrooge in Dickens's own works. Peter Ackroyd, Dickens's biographer, sees similarities between Scrooge and the elder Martin Chuzzlewit character, although the miser is "a more fantastic image" than the Chuzzlewit patriarch; Ackroyd observes that Chuzzlewit's transformation to a charitable figure is a parallel to that of the miser. Douglas-Fairhurst sees that the minor character Gabriel Grub from The Pickwick Papers was also an influence when creating Scrooge.

Portrayals in notable adaptations