The Life and Times of Mr Ebenezer Scrooge
The miser in historical context
Foreword
Charles Dickens’ novella A Christmas Carol, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas, was published in December of 1843. It proved immensely popular and went into thirteen editions by the end of 1844. The story is familar to most if not all, and I won’t recount it here. What I will try to do is to set the story and character into a broader historical context and in doing so, perhaps discover what made Ebenezer Scrooge the man he was.
This has entailed certain assumptions which I think can be justified. The first is that the story is set contemporaneously, which is to say in an unspecified period which corresponds to the time it was written. The second is the age of the central character. This Dickens does not specify, but gives us to understand that Scrooge is an elderly man. In that period, this basically meant anyone over fifty. For the sake of arithmetic simplicity, I have decided to assume that Scrooge was aged sixty at the time of the story.
OK? Here we go.
Early Life
Ebenezer Scrooge was born in 1783, then. Not much is known about his family, but it is safe to assume that they were relatively prosperous, since they were able to send him to boarding school. Not, be it noted…
