Every card in Nineteenth-century novel, Year 10: redemption, poverty and generosity (A Christmas Carol option)
The whole deck, in order — so you can read it through before your child ever sees it.
- In Stave Two, just after seeing himself as a lonely schoolboy, Scrooge says he wishes he had done something differently the night before. What?
Given something to the boy who sang a carol at his door
HintHe had frightened the singer away with a ruler.
WhyIt is his first regret, and it comes early. Dickens makes the change believable by building it in steps, not as one sudden conversion.
- “I am not the man I was.” To which Spirit does Scrooge say this?
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come
HintHe is kneeling by a gravestone.
WhyHe says it in Stave Four, pleading that he would not have been shown all this if he were past hope.
- In the churchyard Scrooge asks whether he is seeing shadows of things that “Will be” or only of things that “May be”. Why does the difference matter?
If they only may be, he can still change the future by changing how he lives
HintOne is fixed, the other is a warning.
WhyThe whole book depends on the answer. The Spirit does not reply, but the last stave shows that the future was not fixed.
- Scrooge's promise at the end of Stave Four: “I will honour Christmas in my ____, and try to keep it all the year.”
heart
HintWhere feelings are said to live.
WhyHe adds “I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future.” He means to keep hold of what all three Spirits taught him.
- The narrator's summary of the changed Scrooge in Stave Five: “He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a ____, as the good old city knew”.
man
HintThe plainest possible word for a person.
WhyFriend, master, man: he is better in private life, at work and in himself. Redemption here means changed behaviour towards other people.
- At the end of Stave Three the Spirit shows two wretched children from under his robe and names them: “This boy is ____. This girl is ____.”
Ignorance; Want
HintThe boy is lack of education; the girl is lack of the things needed to live.
WhyThey are “yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish”. They are ideas given bodies: the results of a society that neglects its poor.
- The Spirit says of the two children “most of all beware this boy”. Which of the two does he mean?
Ignorance
HintThe one that schooling could cure.
WhyOn the boy's brow he sees “that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased”. Dickens is warning that a country which leaves its poor uneducated is heading for disaster.
- When Scrooge asks whose children Ignorance and Want are, the Spirit answers “They are Man's”. What does he mean?
They are the responsibility of all of society, not just of their parents
Hint“Man” here means humankind.
WhyThe comfortable cannot say the poor are somebody else's business. That is the book's case for social responsibility.
- In Stave One Scrooge asks whether the prisons and workhouses are still open. What have his visitors just asked him for?
A donation to buy food, drink and warmth for the poor at Christmas
HintTwo “portly gentlemen” with books and papers.
WhyHis view is that he pays for those institutions through his taxes and owes nothing more. The book sets out to show why that is not enough.
- When Scrooge asks, at the end of Stave Three, whether the two children have no refuge, what does the Spirit reply?
With Scrooge's own questions: are there no prisons, are there no workhouses?
HintThe miser said the same thing to the charity collectors.
WhyThey are the Spirit's last words before he vanishes. Twice in this stave Scrooge's own sayings are turned against him.
- Fred on Christmas in Stave One: “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 ____ freely”.
hearts
HintThe part of a person that is said to feel; the miser keeps his shut.
WhyFor Fred, Christmas is the time when people treat those below them as “fellow-passengers to the grave”. This is the idea of Christmas the book defends.
- How does Scrooge spend the evening of Christmas Eve before he goes home to his rooms?
He eats alone in a tavern and reads the newspapers
HintNo family, no guests.
WhyHe “took his melancholy dinner in his usual melancholy tavern”. His solitude is set against the crowded, noisy parties the Spirits show him.
- The Cratchits' Christmas pudding is small for so large a family. How do they react to it?
With delight: nobody says or thinks that it is small
HintThey praise it as a great success.
Why“Any Cratchit would have blushed to hint at such a thing.” Dickens shows a family rich in affection and short of money, the reverse of Scrooge.
- Besides the Cratchits and Fred, the Ghost of Christmas Present takes Scrooge to miners on a moor, two lighthouse keepers and sailors at sea. What do all these people have in common?
They all keep Christmas, however bleak and lonely the place
HintEach group sings or wishes the others well.
WhyThe visits widen the picture from London to the whole country. Christmas feeling is shown to be everywhere except in Scrooge.
- The Ghost of Christmas Present sprinkles a blessing from his torch on people's dinners. Which kind of dinner does he say he gives it to most?
A poor one
HintThe one that has least to begin with.
WhyAsked why, he says “Because it needs it most.” The book's Christmas is on the side of the poor.
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Keep what you learn
Here, nothing is saved. In your child’s own sky every card is scheduled — it comes back just before they’d forget it — and the professor who wrote it is one tap away.