Maybe the best first page ever written, I love how this book starts. It’s so well known and old that nobody thinks twice about it now, but it is a splendidly written first page. I mean, the book in its whole is a great thing, but the first page is what hooks the reader immediately, and it is great.
I knew the story, of course, everybody knows it, they’ve made lots of shows about it, but I don’t think I ever read the book before, because I didn’t know one little thing at the end…
Well, the story is pretty much what I knew:
Ebenezer Scrooge is rich but doesn’t make good of his money, not even for himself. He hates Christmas because he has nothing to be merry for, and only sees it as a day in which he has to let his clerk stay home and still give him a day’s pay.
He says “humbug” when his nephew Fred comes to greet him a merry Christmas and refuses his invitation to dinner at his house. The jolly young man is not offended though.
Scrooge sends away two men coming to him for a charity cause, refusing to give them any money.
He goes home alone, the same house where his late business partner Jacob Marley lived before he died some seven years before or so. It’s quite an empty house, dark and cold, because he doesn’t waste enough coal to warm it up and only uses a candle to guide him where he needs to go.
As soon as he gets there, he sees Marley’s face on the knocker and then he sees his ghost, trapped in heavy chains, come to talk to him. Marley says he is now tortured by the chains the made himself when he was alive, haunted by the poor choices he made, and wants to prevent Scrooge from having the same fate. He tells him he will receive the visit of three spirits, one the next night, and the others the following night.
he kinda loses track of time, because it was like 2am when he saw Marley, and then it was earlier when the first ghost appeared, the Ghost of Christmas Past.
He takes him to revisit the past, where Scrooge grew up, and we see him alone in class while all the other kids go home for the holiday or are happy together;
another year when his sister comes to tell him that their father agreed to have him come home and they’ll be having a merry Christmas together (she will grow up to be the mother of Fred, but will die before our present times);
later on, he’s an apprentice and there’s a big celebration and dance at his place of work, shut down for Christmas;
now a man, Scrooge is left by the girl he promised to marry; she releases him from the bond, saying that when he made it he was another man and he would not make it now if he had the chance - and indeed he doesn’t fight at all to keep her, he only thinks of making money;
we see that girl’s life later on, she married and had children, and is happy.
Scrooge is shaken by what he saw, it had been years since he thought of the past.
Then it’s time for the Ghost of Christmas Present, a very merry giant that only lives for a day.
Together they visit a miners’ family, and men on a ship, and men everywhere, to see how everyone keeps up the jolly spirit of Christmas;
they visit Fred’s house, where he refused to go, to see him dine with his wife and her sisters and some friends, and have a happy time together; Fred is a lively young man, not angry with him, thinking Scrooge only hurts himself by being that way, and that he will keep going to him every Christmas to wish him a merry one.
Their first stop, though, was the house of his clerk Bob Cratchit, where he has a Christmas meal with his wife and his… five? six children?
They eat their goose and their pudding as if it was the grandest of feasts, and their love for each other is palpable, and Scrooge is moved by the sight of poor Tiny Tim, the smallest child who walks with a crutch and will not live long, maybe not even another year, if things don’t change.
At the end of this ghost’s time, it shows Scrooge two ghost children, Ignorance and Want, saying that Man must beware of them, especially of Ignorance.
Right after him, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come arrives, a gloomy figure “shrouded in a deep black garment”, with his head covered. It never speaks a word, only pointing with one hand.
It shows him someone’s death, only at the end of this visit will Scrooge learn that it was his own death while it’s pretty clear to the reader. We see how people feel nothing about it, since he rejected any human contact in his life that it was not business related.
A few people even took stuff from his house as he died, to sell them for money. A woman took down his bed curtains.
Scrooge asks the ghost to show him someone who feels some emotion for this death, and is shows a couple, indebted to Scrooge, who needed a little more time to pay and is now saved by the bonus time provided by his death.
Scrooge asks to see sadness provoked by death and is shown the Cratchit home, after Tiny Tim died.
Scrooge is moved by everything he saw, and vows to live in the past, the present and the future, from now on, and always keep Christmas in his heart, and he does, totally changing his ways.
When he wakes up and realises that he is alive and not a day has passed, and it still is Christmas, he sends a boy to buy the biggest turkey in town and send it to Cratchit’s house (he does NOT go himself, which is good, he’s not family and also he sends it anonymously, good), then gives a great amount of money (unspecified, he whispered some a number in the man’s ear) when he meets the same man he threw out the day before.
He goes to have dinner with his nephew and spends the night with him, his wife and their guests, having a merry night indeed.
The next day, Bob Cratchit is late for work and Scrooge fakes a rebuff but then tells him that he will raise his salary and assist his struggling family.
We are told that he became like a second father to Tiny Tim, and I faithfully quote, “who did NOT die”, and also a good master and a good friend and a good man to everyone in town.
I thought, by some shows I had seen, that at the end he went to dine with the Cratchits, but it was not really right, I like this ending much much better, because Fred is a good one and he is family, the son of his beloved sister.
I understand that in a movie it is much more moving to end with the sick child but it’s much better this way.
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