A Christmas Carol: Annotation-Friendly Edition

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Scrooge was not much in the habit of cracking jokes, nor did he feel in his heart by any means waggish then. I help to support the prisons and the workhouses, -- they cost enough, -- and those who are badly off must go there. Why was he filled with gladness when he heard them give each other Merry Christmas, as they parted at cross-roads and-bye ways, for their several homes? Scrooge defends the elaborate parties thrown by Fezziwig saying that they were worth the money they cost. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round -- apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that -- as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.

A Christmas Carol Annotations (Full text) | Teaching Resources

Not to know that any Christian spirit working kindly in its little sphere, whatever it may be, will find its mortal life too short for its vast means of usefulness.growled Scrooge , as if that were the only one thing in the world more ridiculous than a merry Christmas. The fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was so dense without, that although the court was of the narrowest, the houses opposite were mere phantoms.

Annotated Christmas Carol - Description | W. W. Norton The Annotated Christmas Carol - Description | W. W. Norton

Words such as 'not behindhand' show clearly that even though they are not related, they have many things in common and that family is about celebrating these similarities. Many other works by Dickens employ the same themes and concerns of A Christmas Carol, including Little Dorrit and Hard Times. Scrooge then remembered to have heard that ghosts in haunted houses were described as dragging chains.Scrooge glanced about him on the floor, in the expectation of finding himself surrounded by some fifty or sixty fathoms of iron cable: but he could see nothing. The Ghost, on hearing this, set up another cry, and clanked its chain so hideously in the dead silence of the night, that the Ward would have been justified in indicting it for a nuisance. Phrases like 'it is precious time to me' show this clearly as Scrooge is showing his motive to improve.