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{{work}}
{{Multiple Works Need Separate Pages}}
[[File:Scrooge_5212.jpg|frame| Ebenezer Scrooge in a decidedly non-festive mood.]]▼
{{Infobox book
| original title = A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas
| image = Scrooge_5212.jpg
| author = Charles Dickens
| central theme = There is no salvation in greed.
| elevator pitch = A miser is visited by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future
| genre = [[Christmas Ghost Story]]
| publication date = December 19, 1843
| source page exists = yes
| wiki URL =
| wiki name =
}}
{{quote|''Bah, humbug!''}}
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Possibly the most widely-adapted story of all time, including versions with [[A Muppet Christmas Carol|the Muppets]] as well as in [[The Present Day]], resulting in lots of [[Adaptation Expansion]] (explaining events and [[Backstory]] the book didn't cover). As the era of television wore on, countless shows did at least one episode thrusting a character into their own Christmas Carol-like scenario, with varying levels of quality. In fact, versions with pre-existing characters are so common that they have led to the creation of the [[Yet Another Christmas Carol]] trope. It's possibly also the source of the [[Pensieve Flashback]].
The novel is in the public domain. You can read the original story [[{{PAGENAME}}/Source|on this wiki]], [[wikisource:A Christmas Carol (Dickens)|on Wikisource]], or [https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/46 on Project Gutenberg].
The website [[JimHillMedia.com]] (which focuses on Disney news and rumors) did a whopping 40-part series in 2007 called "Scrooge U", which examined many adaptations of this story, both famous and obscure, live-action and animated, serious and parodistic, with all kinds of alternate settings.
The British Film Institute has posted the earliest surviving (though in-complete) film version of the story on [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9Mk-B7MKP8 YouTube]; for its time it was a very modern undertaking, special-effects wise (1901). The earliest surviving complete film adaption is the [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EL2Of5xpd9U Thomas Edison version] of 1910.
Not to be confused with actual [[Christmas Carol|Christmas Carols]]
{{tropenamer}}
* [[Dead to Begin With]]
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* [[The Scrooge]]
* [[Yet Another Christmas Carol]]
* ''[[Mickey's Christmas Carol]]''▼
* ''[[The Muppet Christmas Carol]]''
* ''[[Scrooged]]''▼
{{tropelist}}
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* [[Bad Future]]: The vision shown by the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.
* [[Childhood Marriage Promise]]: Scrooge and Belle.
* [[Christmas Ghost Story]]: Far from the first, but definitely the most famous example of the trope. For North American audiences, the [[Trope Maker]].
* [[Corrupt Corporate Executive]]: Scrooge, [[Captain Obvious|duh.]]
* [[Creepy Child]]: Possibly [[Creepy Twins]], though it's never specified. The Ghost of Christmas Present keeps a silent, wraith-like boy and girl -- Ignorance and Want, respectively -- under his cloak, telling Scrooge that they are mankind's children.
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* [[Freudian Excuse]]: Turns out Scrooge's mean old father left him at boarding school during Christmas. Oh, and Scrooge's best (and only) friend died on Christmas Eve. Gee, I wonder why he hates the holiday so much!
** The love of his life also broke off the engagement and dumped him on Christmas, but that was because he was already showing signs of being mean and bitter.
*** Because his sister died giving birth '''on Christmas''' (according to some adaptations).
** It's implied he spurns his nephew because the lad reminds him of his [[Dead Little Sister]].
* [[Future Loser]]: Sort of...
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{{quote|"Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail. Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail."}}
** [[Justified Trope]]: Dickens goes on to say it's important that the reader knows this, or nothing that follows will seem magical.
* [[Lonely
* [[Long Title]]: The full title is in fact ''A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas.'' But [[Officially Shortened Title|when was the last time anyone called it that]]?
* [[Love Makes You Evil]]: Scrooge's miserliness stems from trying to have a comfortable future with his impoverished fiancee, but he then stopped caring about that, and just the money itself. Could also double as [[Start of Darkness]].
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* [[Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane]]: The question is left open whether Scrooge's visitation by spirits was real or [[All Just a Dream]].
* [[Meaningful Name]]: The word "scrooge" was originally slang for "to squeeze", as in Scrooge's tight-fistedness.
** Ebenezer is a Biblical name meaning "stone of help". Some commentators think this was deliberate: Scrooge was "hard and sharp as flint" but was helped to change for the better, and one of the things that helped was his own gravestone.
* [[Money, Dear Boy]]: Dickens originally wrote it to pay off a debt. However, the story was a hit from the first release on. Dickens was also quite fond of the story and would keep revisiting it.
* [[Morally-Bankrupt Banker]]: Scrooge.
* [[Narrative Profanity Filter]]: When Fred invites Scrooge to Christmas dinner.
{{quote|"Scrooge said that he would see him--Yes, indeed, he did. He went the whole length of the expression, and said that he would see him in that extremity first."}}
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* [[Parlor Games]]: The guests at Fred's party play some; the original story used both Blind Man's Bluff and Twenty Questions.
* [[Pensieve Flashback]]
* [["The Reason You Suck" Speech]]: After delivering his [[Ironic Echo]] to Scrooge, the Ghost of Christmas Present takes him to task for presuming he has the right to refer to some people as a "surplus population."
{{quote|"Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man's child. Oh God. To hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust."}}
* [[Right on the Tick]]: Subverted. The spirits are supposed to come on three consecutive nights, at specified times. They arrive at the specific time, but all the visitations somehow happen in one night.
* [[Rule of Three]]: The ghosts of Christmas past, Christmas present and Christmas yet to come.
* [[Sacred Hospitality]]
* [[Set Right What Once Went Wrong]]: Scrooge and Tiny Tim's deaths are seen and then averted.
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* [[Start of Darkness]]: The whole point of the book.
* [[The Scrooge]]: The [[Trope Namer]], and possibly [[Trope Codifier]].
* [[The Social Darwinist]]: Scrooge is your typical Malthusian aristocrat of the time. Suffice to say that another of Dickens's fictional followers of Malthus, Filer in ''[[The Chimes]]'', says the poor "have no earthly right or business to be born. And ''that'' we know they haven't. We reduced it to a mathematical certainty long ago!" Scrooge's battlefield is more market than campaign.
* [[The Speechless]]: The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.
* [["There and Back" Story]]: One that takes Scrooge through time rather than space, and he returns to his home a changed man.
* [[Time Passes Montage]]: Broadly the entire visit to the past, but most especially the moment in the schoolroom when Scrooge sees his entire childhood pass in moments.
* [[Time Travel]]: The ghost of Christmas yet to come – but travelling only as an observer.
* [[Truth in Television]]: ''By the standards of his time'' Scrooge wasn't a particularly harsh employer. Many people worked right through Christmas---note that when "reformed," Scrooge ''expects'' to find a poultry shop open on Christmas Day itself, and is not disappointed.
** At one point, Dickens uses a conversation between Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Present for an [[Author Tract]] about blue laws prohibiting bakeries from being open on Sundays.
** There are a few subtle and not-so-subtle temporal references which would be lost on readers from another era. It's 1843 and, as the capital of a mighty Empire, metropolitan London is a beacon of modernity. Slavery [[wikipedia:Slavery Abolition Act 1833|has just been abolished]] Empire-wide, unlike the wretched backwaters of the United States of America where the price of cotton has collapsed, the landowners are [https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/social-science-history/article/credit-market-discipline-and-capitalist-slavery-in-antebellum-south-carolina/5D4AD043345081CFA468BABA873B64F1/core-reader struggling], states are defaulting on loans and the banks [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/jan/22/usa.davidteather have repossessed more than a thousand mortgaged slaves] as debtors try in vain to avoid utter default. After a short-lived prosperity after the War of 1812, the economy had indeed slid well into a major economic depression unequalled by anything until [[The Great Depression]] and municipalities were banding together to discourage paupers from begging for alms for the poor by building what they called "union workhouses" – no, not the trade unions of later years, but a union of municipalities joining together to build and operate a wretched poorhouse where beggars would have to work to earn the barest subsistence housing and a few table scraps. And then there were the financial instruments, such as the "demand note" – a form of IOU where the bearer could present the note and be paid by the debtor on three days notice – a reasonably stable economic concept, but one which would surely break if [[Time Travel|one were to break the normal passage of time]]. Of course the English note was good, while debt backed by the US states was likely worthless (and Dickens does get a [[Take That]] or two in about the economic situation). A few other concepts, such as Malthus and the very first glimmers of awareness of the consequences of human overpopulation, were also new in this era.
** In any case, Cratchit should be glad simply to have a job - as it appears he was, though his wife didn't agree. These were tough times and so many had no employment at all. A worker who lost his situation in the middle of a great economic depression would certainly not be able to readily find another, so Scrooge was really no worse than many of the alternatives at the time.
** For that matter, Christmas in this day was merely a somewhat minor religious festival. It didn't take on the scale it would attain a century later until capitalists learned to fully, cynically exploit it as the mass marketing opportunity we see today. Food and transport were still available at a price, same as any other working day.
**
* [[Victorian London]]: That being the time and place it was written and set in.
* [[Villain Protagonist]]: Scrooge prior to his [[Heel Face Turn]]. He is a selfish, crotchety [[Corrupt Corporate Executive]] who underpays Bob Cratchit to the point where he can't afford the treatment to cure his [[Inspirationally Disadvantaged]] son, refuses to give money to an organization providing services to the poor, after which he delivers a speech advocating the poor offing themselves since they deserve nothing better than prisons and workhouses, [[Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking|and isn't even willing to give Bob the day off on Christmas]]. No wonder he was set to walk the earth fettered with more chains than Jacob Marley had before his [[Heel Face Turn]].
** To be fair to Scrooge, the workhouses were relatively new and the conditions inside them [[Fair for Its Day|were not seen as particularly hellish at the time]]. The "prisons and workhouses" line is the equivalent of the modern-day attitude "let the government take care of it" (with the next line having another modern echo in that some people would rather die than go on welfare). However, this doesn't excuse Scrooge's tight-fisted attitude, any more than it would excuse a modern wealthy person who uses the existence of welfare to get out of performing charitable acts.
▲=== Adaptations with their own trope pages include: ===
▲* ''[[Mickey's Christmas Carol]]''
▲* ''[[The Muppet Christmas Carol]]''
▲* ''[[Scrooged]]''
=== Other adaptations provide examples of: ===
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* [[Adaptation-Induced Plothole]]/[[They Just Didn't Care]]: Almost every single adaptation, even the illustrations in the original novella, depicts Scrooge in Victorian nightwear during his travels with the ghosts, even though Dickens explicitly states that Scrooge "went straight to bed, without undressing, and fell asleep upon the instant." The 1984 version with George C. Scott avoids this.
** It's not that the adaptations don't care, but rather that Scrooge getting ready for bed and getting steadily more spooked by his empty, shadowy house has become an expected part of the story in the adaptations. It's basically throwing a bone to the actors and allowing the films to build tone for the scenes to come.
* [[Affectionate Parody]]: There is a
* [[And There Was Much Rejoicing]]: The "Thank You Very Much" number from the 1970 ''Scrooge'' film takes this to the extreme of having nearly the whole of London celebrating his demise. The next morning, there is a [[Triumphant Reprise]] in which the same characters sing the same song, but now celebrating Scrooge's change of heart.
* [[Berserk Button]]: Jacob Marley with Scrooge. Poor guy was so frustrated he ''dislocated his own jaw'' during one of his ghostly wailing fits.
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* [[Catch Phrase]]: "Bah, humbug!", thanks to [[Lost in Imitation]] - the phrase is uttered only twice in the original work.
** "Humbug," on its own, is said seven times, however, all in the first chapter. They even [[Lampshade]] it with "He tried to say “Humbug!” but stopped at the first syllable."
** And in
* [[Cluster F-Bomb]]: Among the adaptations, ''A Diva's Christmas Carol'' is the crowner. This is both surprising and predictable; the movie was produced by a television network, but that network was [[VH-1]].
* [[Creepy Child]]: Ignorance and Want tend to get left out of adaptations, probably for time and other obvious reasons. But they're in the Alastair Sim version, which never lets you forget that it's a ''[[Christmas Ghost Story|ghost story]]''. And the [[Richard Williams]] version, in which they look positively ''demonic''.
** Two street children figure in a British telemovie adaptation in which Eddie Scrooge is an inner-city loan shark who needs to learn the error of his ways. Scrooge has visions of them freezing to death in an alley, and one of the components to him achieving his salvation is to find and rescue them before they perish.
** They make a startling appearance in the 2009 Disney(!) version where they morph into adults: a thug and a(n implied) prostitute, respectively. They also get Present's [[Ironic Echo|line]] about prisons and [[Freudian Slip|wh--]] ''work''houses.
* [[Deadpan Snarker]]: Scrooge in some versions, particularly Alastair Sim's Scrooge.
** Also,
*** Even more so in the 1970 musical.
** Marley in one stage play version:
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**** Scrooge, after his redemption, is usually this in some adaptations.
* [[Mood Whiplash]]: In the Robert Zemeckis version. One minute, Scrooge is being chased by demonic shadowy horses, the next he's crawling through a sewer pipe with a chipmunk voice. And then, back to the horses.
** Also done quite skillfully in the Marley scene. At one point, Marley yells so powerfully that he dislocates his jaw, then says the next line by moving his lower jaw with his hand (borders between disturbing and funny) before attempting to put it back and in the process folding his face up tightly to the point where he cannot speak ([[Crowning Moment of Funny]]).
* [[The Musical]]: Many musical versions exist; among them are:
** ''The Stingiest Man in Town'' (A 1956 TV production adapted into a [[Rankin/Bass Productions]] animated special in 1978)
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** ''Scrooge'' (1970, with Albert Finney; later became a successful U.K. stage musical)
** ''[[The Muppet Christmas Carol]]'' (1992)
** A 2004 TV movie starring Kelsey Grammer (which was an
* [[Never Trust a Trailer]]: The 2009 version's trailer made it look like your average Jim Carrey, kid-friendly, physical comedy movie. It's actually much more adult oriented, serious and scary at some parts. There's also the minor infraction of Scrooge blowing a snowflake off his nose out of sheer spite for the season in the trailer, but not in the movie.
** And only "some" scenes may be scary to "small" children.
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* [[Pragmatic Adaptation]]: Disney's version being the most prominent.
* [[Pretty in Mink]]: Not in the book, but in many of the adaptations, at least one or two furs, like a muff or fur-trimmed cape, will show up at some point. And of course there is the robe worn by the Ghost of Christmas Present.
* [[Self-Inflicted Hell]]: Besides literally. Many versions show that the person that suffers the most for Scrooge's miserly manner and distance from the world... is Ebenezer Scrooge.
* [[Shout-Out]]: In the [[Robert Zemeckis]] version, during the opening credits, a few kids are having fun by [[Back to the Future (film)|clinging onto the backs of carriages and hitching a ride on them.]] Upon being redeemed, Scrooge himself does this too.
* [[Show Within a Show]]: The framing story of
* [[Spell My Name with an "S"]]: Fan, Fran, Fanny, you get the picture.
* [[Sssssnaketalk]]: The Ghossssst of Chrisssstmasss Passsst.
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* [[Talking to Himself]]: In the Zemeckis adaptation, Jim Carrey voices/acts out Scrooge and all three Christmas Ghosts, though in the case of Christmas Yet To Come, it's not so much talking as it is pointing out to/chasing/scaring the living daylights out of.
** Scrooge lampshades this when laughing at the end and realizing that he sounds just like the Ghost of Christmas Present.
* [[True Meaning of Christmas]]: Varies depending on the adaptation. Some, like the 1951 version, plainly mention Jesus and the Nativity, along with other Biblical references. Others, like ''[[Scrooged]]'', barely acknowledge it at all.
** nearly all versions include the line "...who, upon Christmas Day, made lame
* [[Twice-Told Tale]]: Louis Bayard's ''Mr. Timothy.''
* [[The Voiceless]]: Every depiction of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. How Jim Carrey voices him in the Zemeckis adaptation baffles this editor (It might have just been Motion Capture, though).
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** In the original novel, there's one scene where Scrooge hears lines of poetry being recited in his head which definitely did not come from himself, but it never outright states that Yet To Come actually spoke (telepathically).
** In the George C. Scott movie, the spirit of Yet to Come doesn't speak, but every time it "responds" to Scrooge, a weird metallic wail is heard in the background.
* [[Word of Dante]]: Several details of the story have been used in so many stage and screen adaptions that it's surprising to learn that they weren't in Dickens' original. Belle is often referred to as Fezziwig's daughter, when no such detail exists in the book (in fact, many adaptions give her name as "Isabelle," whereas in the book she's simply called "Belle"). Also, the reason for Scrooge's hostility toward
{{reflist}}
{{The Big Read}}
[[Category:Nineteenth Century Literature]]▼
[[Category:{{PAGENAME}}]]
[[Category:Christmas Movies]]
[[Category:Christmas Ghost Story]]
[[Category:Literature]]
[[Category:Literature of the 19th century]]
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