Book Club Questions for A Christmas Carol

1.Dickens describes his book as a 'Ghostly little book' that aims to 'raise the Ghost of an Idea.' What do you think he means by that phrase? What kind of 'idea' do you imagine he wants to haunt his readers?

2.He expresses the specific hope that the book will not put his readers 'out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me.' Why might a story about a miser, poverty, and death risk doing exactly that? What does this tell you about the spirit in which Dickens is writing?

3.Dickens signs himself 'Their faithful Friend and Servant.' This is an unusual way for an author to address readers. What does it suggest about the relationship he wants to have with his audience — and with this story?

1.Dickens uses a remarkable string of adjectives to describe Scrooge: 'squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous.' He also says Scrooge was 'secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster,' and that he 'carried his own low temperature always about with him.' What picture do these images build? What kind of life does Scrooge appear to be living?

2.Scrooge's nephew Fred argues that Christmas is valuable not because it puts 'a scrap of gold or silver' in his pocket, but because it is the one time of year when people 'open their shut-up hearts freely, and think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave.' Scrooge dismisses this as humbug.

3.When the two charity collectors ask Scrooge for a donation, he asks 'Are there no prisons? And the Union workhouses — are they still in operation?' He genuinely believes the poor should use these institutions. What does his logic reveal about the way he sees human beings? Have you ever caught yourself reasoning in a similar way — treating a system as a sufficient substitute for personal compassion?

1.The Ghost of Christmas Past is described paradoxically: 'like a child: yet not so like a child as like an old man,' with white hair yet a face without a wrinkle, and a jet of light springing from its head that it sometimes covers with an extinguisher-cap. What might Dickens intend by making the spirit of memory look both ancient and young at once?

2.When Scrooge sees his childhood self alone at school, he 'sobbed.' Then, noticing the boy-singer he had frightened away the night before, he says quietly, 'I should like to have given him something: that's all.' This is the first flicker of empathy in Scrooge.

3.Old Fezziwig spends 'but a few pounds of mortal money' on the Christmas party, and yet his apprentices are overflowing with gratitude. When the Ghost points this out, Scrooge defends Fezziwig without realizing he is indicting himself: 'He has the power to render us happy or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome... The happiness he gives is quite as great as if it cost a fortune.' What is the difference between Fezziwig's kind of leadership and Scrooge's? Which one requires more — money or something else?

1.The Ghost of Christmas Present sits on a throne of food — 'turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples...' — and carries a torch that blesses the dinners of the poor most of all 'because they need it most.' What is Dickens saying about the relationship between abundance and generosity? About who most deserves festivity?

2.When Scrooge suggests that the Spirit would 'cramp these people's opportunities of innocent enjoyment' by closing shops on Sundays, the Ghost is indignant and says that those who do such things 'are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived.' What is Dickens critiquing here, and why does he put this rebuke in the mouth of the Spirit of Christmas?

3.The Cratchit family is 'not a handsome family; they were not well dressed; their shoes were far from being water-proof; their clothes were scanty.' And yet they are 'happy, grateful, pleased with one another, and contented with the time.' Bob Cratchit toasts Scrooge as 'the Founder of the Feast,' while Mrs. Cratchit can barely choke the words out.

1.Unlike the first two spirits, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come does not speak a single word. It is 'shrouded in a deep black garment, which concealed its head, its face, its form,' with only one outstretched hand visible. Why might Dickens have made the spirit of the future mute and faceless? What does silence add to its power?

2.The businessmen on the Exchange discuss the death of an unnamed man with casual indifference. 'What has he done with his money?' is their first question. One offers to attend the funeral only 'if a lunch is provided.' What does this scene reveal about the kind of relationships Scrooge's way of life has produced?

3.Three people — a charwoman, a laundress, and an undertaker's man — have stripped a dead man's rooms and meet at Old Joe's junk shop to sell the plunder, including the dead man's bed-curtains (pulled down while he lay in the bed) and the shirt off his back. The charwoman says: 'If he wanted to keep 'em after he was dead, a wicked old screw, why wasn't he natural in his lifetime? If he had been, he'd have had somebody to look after him.' What is Dickens saying about the connection between how we treat others and how we are treated in return?

1.Scrooge wakes up laughing and crying at once, gets his stockings on inside out, and declares himself 'as light as a feather, as happy as an angel, as merry as a schoolboy, as giddy as a drunken man.' Dickens notes that 'for a man who had been out of practice for so many years, it was a splendid laugh, a most illustrious laugh — the father of a long, long line of brilliant laughs.' What does it mean that Scrooge's laugh needed to be re-learned? What had suppressed it for so many years?

2.Scrooge's first act of generosity is anonymous — he sends the enormous prize turkey to Bob Cratchit without signing his name. Why does he choose to give anonymously? What does anonymity add to the gift, and what might it suggest about the nature of true generosity?

3.On the street, Scrooge meets the portly charity collector he dismissed so cruelly the day before. He whispers a large donation in his ear and the man cries, 'Lord bless me! My dear Mr. Scrooge, are you serious?' Scrooge replies: 'Not a farthing less. A great many back-payments are included in it.' What does the phrase 'back-payments' suggest about how Scrooge understands his own past? Is he trying to compensate for lost time, or something more than that?

1.Which of the five Staves affected you most deeply, and why? Was there a specific scene, image, or line of dialogue that has stayed with you since you read it?

2.Marley tells Scrooge: 'The chain I wear I forged in life, link by link and yard by yard.' Looking back across your own life, what habits, attitudes, or patterns of relating to others have you been forging — and what do you want to do differently?

3.The three Ghosts represent three kinds of moral vision: the ability to see your past clearly, to see the present lives of others fully, and to see where your current course is leading. Which of these three kinds of sight do you find hardest to sustain in your own life, and why?