Christmas Carol Essay: the Changes in Scrooge Before and After the Spirits

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Christmas Carol Essay In the play script 'Christmas Carol' by Charles Dickens, the protagonist, Ebenezer Scrooge, a bitter old man who is greedy and tightfisted, changes his attitude throughout the story after being visited by three spirits who teach him about kindness and generosity during the Christmas season. It is important to explore the states of mind that Scrooge endures to fully understand his personality before and after the visits of the spirits. To begin with, in the beginning of the story, Scrooge is a cold-hearted, tight-fisted and greedy man, who despises Christmas and all things which give people happiness. As shown in the play script "The cold within him freezes his old features, stiffens his gait, makes his eyes red, his thin lips blue" (page 2 line 22). This is shown when Scrooge rudely turns away two gentlemen who seek a donation from him to provide a Christmas dinner for the Poor. His only "Christmas gift" is allowing his overworked, underpaid clerk Bob Cratchit Christmas Day off, which he does only because it is customary. Scrooge considers Christmas "A poor excuse for picking a man’s pocket every twenty-fifth of December!" as shown in the play script (page 10 line 21). When he is visited by the ghost of Jacob Marley, his work partner who had died seven years ago, Marley warns Scrooge to change his ways so that he does not undergo the same miserable afterlife as Marley, who is bound in chains as a punishment for being greedy and cold-hearted. Secondly, when Scrooge is visited by the ghost of Christmas past, who “looks like an old man shrunk to the size of a child. White hair hangs down its back, but its face has no wrinkles. Its arms, legs and feet are bare. It wears a white tunic, trimmed with spring flowers and a belt which shines beautifully” (page 21 line 17), he is taken to Christmas scenes of his boyhood, which include the small
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