88 pages • 2 hours read
Charles DickensA Christmas Carol
Fiction | Novella | Middle Grade | Published in 1843A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
Time
The motif of time is crucial because Scrooge’s time is running out. Scrooge is haunted by bells counting down the hours and minutes—for instance, “the gruff old bell [that] was always peeping slily down at Scrooge out of a Gothic window in the wall” (6). With Scrooge’s rebirth, the bells ring out in wild abandon, no longer marking time because the future is now unconstrained; Scrooge is free to create it for himself.
The spirits obviously represent the past, present, and future, but they also more subtly represent a distortion of time. The Ghost of Christmas Past and the Ghost of Christmas Present each arrive at one o’clock with no intervening day between. The Ghost of Christmas Present disappears at midnight, but the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come appears immediately afterward with no intervening hour, even though each visitation was supposed to begin at one o’clock. Scrooge also observes that the scenes to which the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come escorts him seem to take place in no particular chronological order. The compression and distortion of time suggests that time is indeed malleable and that therefore the future is malleable as well, which is essential to Scrooge’s transformation because one of his strongest motives is to save Tiny Tim.
Ignorance and Want
Ignorance and want—or ignorance of want—are the reasons why Dickens wrote the story in the first place. He set out to call attention to the suffering of the lower economic classes. Want refers to the survival needs of the poor: food, shelter, medical care, sanitation, education, etc. An economic class that can’t meet these basic needs is a threat to a stable society. Ignorance might, on a superficial level, refer to the lack of education in the lower classes, but it more importantly refers to Scrooge’s ignorance of the existence of want. It is ignorance in particular that Dickens sees as the “doom” of humankind because it is ignorance that allows want to go unchecked.
In the story, Dickens personifies ignorance and want as emaciated and horrifying children. Though on the one hand a literal depiction of ignorance and want’s effects, the children are also significant for their association with the Ghost of Christmas Present, from whose robes they emerge. Their connection with this otherwise jolly figure implies the importance of attending to the immediate (“present”) miseries and afflictions of the world.
The Old Man and the Child Savior
Taken together, Scrooge and Tiny Tim represent the archetype of the “senex” and the “puer”—the old man and the child. Typically, this dyad is a relationship in which the child conveys the essential qualities of a child to an older person (usually, but not necessarily, a man). Those qualities include innocence, empathy, imagination, boundless potential, and simply the ability to be happy. In some cases, the roles can be reversed; for example, in A Miracle on 34th Street, the old man conveys a sense of wonder and imagination to a child.
Related Titles
By Charles Dickens
