A Christmas Carol
by Charles Dickens
illustrated by Scott McKowen
(New York: Sterling, 2009)
I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a doornail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade.
Page 1.
Scrooge never painted out Old Marley’s name. there it stood, years afterward, above the warehouse door: Scrooge and Marley.
Page 2.
He was a tightfisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner!
Page 2.
He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog days; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas.
Page 2.
The city clocks had only just gone three, but it was quite dark already - it had not been light all day.
Page 3.
“What reason have you to be merry? You’re poor enough.”
Page 3.
“If I could work my will,” said Scrooge indignantly, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.”
Page 4.
“I want nothing from you; I ask nothing of you; why cannot we be friends?”
Page 5.
“Mr. Marley has been dead these seven years,” Scrooge replied. “He died seven years ago, this very night.”
Page 6.
“I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry.” Page 7.
“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
Page 7.
“It’s enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people’s.”
Page 7.
The fog and darkness thickened so, that people ran about with flaring links, proffering their services to go before horses in carriages, and conduct them on their way.
Page 7.
Foggier yet, and colder. Piercing, searching, biting cold.
Page 8.
Scrooge took his melancholy dinner n his usual melancholy tavern, and having read all the newspapers, and beguiled the rest of the evening with his banker’s book, went home to bed. He lived in chambers which had once belonged to his deceased partner. They were a gloomy suite of rooms, in a lowering pile of building up a yard. … Nobody lived in it but Scrooge, the other rooms being all let out as offices.
Page 9.
There was nothing at all particular about the knocker on the door, except that it was very large.
Page 9.
It was not angry or ferocious, but looked at Scrooge as Marley used to look: with ghostly spectacles turned up on its ghostly forehead.
Page 10.
There was nothing on the back of the door except the screws and nuts that held the knocker on, so he said, “Pooh, pooh!” and closed it with a bang.
Page 10.
Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it.
Page 10.
Scrooge then remembered to have heard that ghosts in haunted houses were describe as dragging chains.
Pages 11-12.
The chain he drew was clasped about his middle. It was long, and wound about him like a tail; and it was made (for Scrooge observed it closely) of cash boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel.
Page 12.
The ghost sat down on the opposite side of the fireplace, as if he were quite used to it.
Page 14.
The truth is that he tired to be smart, as a means of distracting his own attention, and keeping down his terror; for the specter’s voice disturbed the very marrow in his bones.
Page 14.
Though the Ghost sat perfectly motionless, its hair, and skirts, and tassels, were still agitated as by the hot vapor from an oven.
Page 14.
“Why do spirits walk the earth, and why do they come to me?”
“It is required of every man,” the Ghost returned, “that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow men, and travel far and wide; and if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death. It is doomed to wander through the world - oh, woe is me! - and witness what it cannot share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to happiness!”
Page 15.
“I wear the chain I forged in life,” Replied the Ghost. “I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.”
Page 15.
“I cannot rest, I cannot stay, I cannot linger anywhere.”
Page 15.
It was a habit with Scrooge, whenever he became thoughtful, to put his hands in his breeches pockets.
Page 16.
“This earth must pass into eternity before the good of which it is susceptible is all developed.”
Page 16.
“Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”
Page 16.
“How it is that I appear before you in a shape that you can see, I may not tell. I have sat invisible beside you many and many a day.”
Page 17.
The apparition walked backward from him; and at every step it took, the window raised itself a little, so that when the specter reached it, it was wide open.
Page 18.
Whether these creatures faded into mist, or mist enshrouded them, he could not tell. But they and their spirit voices faded together; and the night became as it had been when he walked home.
Page 18.
The curtains of his bed were drawn aside, I tell you, by a hand. Not the curtains at his feet, nor the curtains at his back, but those to which his face was addressed. The curtains of his bed were drawn aside, and Scrooge started up into a half-recumbent attitude, found himself face to face with the unearthly visitor who drew them: as close to it as I am now to you, and I am standing in the spirit at your elbow.
Pages 20-21.
“Bear but a touch of my hand there,” said the Spirit, laying it upon his hear, “and you shall be upheld in more than this!”
Page 22.
He was conscious of a thousand odors floating in the air, each one connected with a thousand thoughts, and hopes, and joys, and cares long, long forgotten!
Page 23.
“These are but shadows of the things that have been,” said the Ghost. They have no consciousness of us.”
Page 23.
A lonely boy was reading near a feeble fire; and Scrooge sat down upon a form, and wept to see his poor forgotten self as he used to be.
Page 24.
“There is nothing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!”
Page 32.
“You fear the world too much.”
Page 32.
“Your own feeling tells you that you were not what you are.”
Page 32.
“May you be happy in the life you have chosen!”
She left him, and they parted.
Page 33.
The relentless Ghost pinioned him in both his arms, and forced him to observe what happened next.
Page 33.
I should have liked, I do confess, to have had the lightest licence of a child, and yet to have been man enough to know its value.
Page 34.
“I told you these were shadows of the things that have been,” said the Ghost. “That they are what they are, do not blame me!”
Page 35.
He wished to challenge the Spirit on the moment of its appearance, and did not wish to be taken by surprise and made nervous.
Page 37.
Being prepared for almost anything, he was not by any means prepared for nothing.
Page 38.
It is always the person not in the predicament who knows what ought to have been done in it, and would unquestionably have done it too.
Page 38.
The housefronts looked black enough, and the windows blacker, contrasting with the smooth white sheet of snow upon the roofs, and with the dirtier snow upon the ground; which last deposit had been plowed up in deep furrows by the heavy wheels of carts and wagons; furrows that crossed and recrossed each other hundreds of times where the great streets branched off; and made intricate channels, hard to trace in the thick yellow mud and icy water.
Page 38.
“There are some upon this earth of yours,” returned the spirit, “who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and ki, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.”
Page 43.
It was a remarkable quality of the Ghost (which Scrooge had observed at the baker’s) that notwithstanding his gigantic size, he could accommodate himself to any place with ease.
Page 43.
The Spirit smiled, ad stopped to bless Bob Cratchit’s dwelling with the sprinkling of his torch. Think of that! Bob had but fifteen “Bob” a week himself; he pocketed on Saturdays but fifteen copies of his Christian name; and yet the Ghost of Christmas Present blessed his four-roomed house!
Page 43.
Alas for Tiny Tim, he bore a little crutch, and had his limbs supported by an iron frame!
Page 44.
“God bless us every one!” said Tiny Tim, the last of all.
Pages 47, 81.
“If these shadows remain unaltered by the future, the child will die.”
Page 47.
“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.”
Page 47.
Scrooge was the ogre of the family. The mention of his name cast a dark shadow on the party which was not dispelled for full five minutes.
Page 49.
They were not a handsome family; they were not well dressed; their shoes were far from being waterproof; their clothes were scanty; and Peter might have known, and very likely did, the inside of a pawnbroker’s. But they were happy, grateful, pleased with one another, and concerned with the time.
Page 49.
It is a fair, evenhanded, noble adjustment of things, that while there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor.
Page 52.
It is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child himself.
Page 54.
It was strange, too, that while Scrooge remained unaltered in his outward form, the Ghost grew older, clearly older.
Page 56.
“They are Man’s,” said the Spirit, looking down upon them. “And they cling to me, appealing form their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.”
Pages 57-58.
He remembered the prediction of old Jacob Marley, and lifting up his eyes, beheld a solemn Phantom, draped and hooded, coming, like a mist along the ground, toward him.
Page 58.
In the very air through which this Spirit moved it seemed to scatter gloom and mystery.
Page 59.
The upper portion of the garment was contracted for an instant in its folds, as if the spirit had inclined its head. That was the only answer he received.
Page 59.
It thrilled him with a vague uncertain horror to know that behind the dusky shroud there were ghostly eyes intently fixed upon him, while he, though he stretched his own to the utmost, could see nothing but a spectral hand and one great heap of black.
Page 60.
They scarcely seemed to enter the city; for the city rather seemed to spring up about them, and encompass them of its own act.
Page 60.
“If he wanted to keep ‘em after he was dead, a wicked old screw” pursued the woman, “why wasn’t he natural in his lifetime? If he had been, he’d have had somebody to look after him when he was struck with death, instead of lying gasping out his last there, alone by himself.”
Pages 63-64.
“He frightened everyone away from him when he was alive, to profit us when he was dead!”
Page 65.
“However and whenever we part from one another, I am sure we shall none of us forget poor Tiny Tim - shall we - or this first parting that there was among us?”
Page 70.
Spirit of Tiny Tim, they childish essence was from God!
Page 70.
“I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the past, the present, and the future. The spirits of all three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach. Oh, tell me I may sponge away the writing on this stone!”
Page 73.
Holding up his hands in a last prayer to have his fate reversed, he saw an alteration in the Phantom’s hood and dress. It shrunk, collapsed, and dwindled down into a bedpost.
Page 73.
“I don’t know what to do!” cried Scrooge, laughing and crying in the same breath.
Pages 74-75.
“I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel. I am as merry as a schoolboy. I am as giddy as a drunken man. A merry Christmas to everybody! A happy New Year to all the world.”
Page 75.
“I don’t know anything. I’m quite a baby. Never mind. I don’t care. I’d rather be a baby.”
Page 75.
“Now, I’ll tell you what, my friend,” said Scrooge, “I am not going to stand this sort of thing any longer. And therefore,” he continued, leaping from his stool and giving Bob such a dig in the waistcoat that he staggered back into the tank again; “and therefore I am about to raise your salary!”
Page 80.
Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their till of laughter in the outset.
Page 81.
It was always said of him that he knew how to keep Christmas well.
Page 81.
And so, as Tiny Tin observed, God bless Us, Every One!
Pages 81, 47.