99 Fun Facts About A Christmas Carol

What is the name of Scrooge's deceased business partner in A Christmas Carol?

Jacob Marley, Scrooge's late partner, returns as a ghost on Christmas Eve to warn him that three spirits will visit, offering him a chance to escape Marley's fate.

By calling Christmas 'humbug', what is Scrooge saying the holiday is?

A fraud: 'humbug' began as eighteenth-century student slang for a hoax or deception, so Scrooge is dismissing the whole season as a sham; he first snaps it when his nephew bursts in full of good cheer.

In A Christmas Carol, which spirit tells Scrooge it has had more than eighteen hundred brothers?

The Ghost of Christmas Present says so, and Scrooge mutters, 'A tremendous family to provide for!'; the spirit's life is brief, and Scrooge sees its hair turn grey before it vanishes at midnight.

Bob Cratchit's fifteen 'Bob' a week in A Christmas Carol puns on slang for which coin?

Shilling: the coin was known as a bob, so Dickens jokes that the clerk 'pocketed on Saturdays but fifteen copies of his Christian name'; on that he keeps a wife and six children in a four-roomed house.

Which line of Tiny Tim's closes A Christmas Carol?

'God bless us, every one!' is first heard at the Cratchits' Christmas dinner, where Tiny Tim, on a stool close to his father's side, is the last of the family to answer Bob's toast.

In A Christmas Carol, what does Scrooge at first blame for the sight of Marley's ghost in his room?

Indigestion: Scrooge tells the ghost it may be 'an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese', and puns that there is 'more of gravy than of grave' about it.

A Christmas Carol is usually classed as which kind of literary work?

Novella: where Dickens's novels first came out in instalments, the Carol was a fraction of their length and was published complete in a single small volume a few days before Christmas.

In A Christmas Carol, what is the name of Scrooge's cheerful nephew, who invites him to Christmas dinner every year?

Fred, the only child of Scrooge's late sister, keeps inviting his uncle to Christmas dinner despite constant rejection and toasts him anyway.

Sales of which Dickens novel were slumping, deepening his money troubles, when he began A Christmas Carol?

Martin Chuzzlewit sold so poorly that Chapman & Hall hinted at docking Dickens £50 a month; he began the Carol partly to make up the shortfall, and within a year he had left the firm for its printers.

What does Scrooge buy for the Cratchit family after his transformation?

Scrooge sends the prize turkey, 'twice the size of Tiny Tim', anonymously by cab from the poulterer's; the Cratchits had been making do with a goose.

What is wrong with Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol?

He walks with a crutch and wears an iron frame on his limbs; Dickens never names the illness, only that the boy will die unless the future changes.

What does Marley's ghost wear when he appears to Scrooge?

A long chain of cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers and steel purses winds round him like a tail; 'I wear the chain I forged in life,' he says, made 'link by link' and put on of his own free will.

A Christmas Carol appeared in 1843 under which British monarch?

Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were making the Christmas tree fashionable in those same years, yet no Christmas tree appears anywhere in the Carol, which was published on 19 December 1843.

What are the chapters of A Christmas Carol called?

Staves: the musical term suits a story called a carol, and Dickens repeated the trick a year later in The Chimes, a tale of church bells whose four parts are called 'quarters'.

What does the Ghost of Christmas Present bring out from his clothing as midnight nears?

Two children, Ignorance and Want, kneel at the spirit's feet; the Ghost tells Scrooge to beware them both, but the boy above all, for on his brow is written Doom.

After the three spirits' visits, a boy tells Scrooge it is which day?

Christmas Day: Marley had set the visits for three successive nights, the first when 'the bell tolls One', yet Scrooge wakes to find that 'the Spirits have done it all in one night'.

What is the name of Scrooge's former employer who threw generous Christmas parties?

Mr. Fezziwig clears his warehouse for a Christmas Eve ball, and when the Ghost calls it a small matter Scrooge defends him: 'The happiness he gives is quite as great as if it cost a fortune.'

What is the name of Scrooge's sister who is shown by the Ghost of Christmas Past?

Little Fan comes to fetch him home from boarding school for good, because their father has grown 'so much kinder'; she later died leaving one child, the nephew who keeps inviting Scrooge to dinner.

What is the name of the woman who was once engaged to Scrooge?

Belle releases Scrooge from the engagement, telling him a golden idol has displaced her; the Ghost then shows her years later as a happy wife and mother, laughing among her children.

What is Scrooge's first name?

Ebenezer is a Hebrew name meaning 'stone of help', a memorial stone Samuel raised in the Bible; 'scrooge' has since become a common noun for a miser.

Which actor played Scrooge in the 1951 British film of A Christmas Carol?

Alastair Sim starred in the film known in Britain simply as Scrooge, and twenty years later voiced the miser again in Richard Williams's animated version, which won the Oscar for best animated short.

In The Muppet Christmas Carol, which Muppet plays Scrooge's humble clerk Bob Cratchit?

Kermit the Frog plays Cratchit opposite Miss Piggy as his wife; it was the first Muppet film made after Jim Henson's death in 1990, so Steve Whitmire was performing Kermit in his place.

Who played Scrooge in The Muppet Christmas Carol?

Michael Caine said he would play it 'like I'm working with the Royal Shakespeare Company'; David Hemmings, Ron Moody and George Carlin had been considered.

Which Muppet character serves as the narrator in The Muppet Christmas Carol?

Gonzo the Great narrates as Charles Dickens himself, with Rizzo the Rat as his sidekick; director Brian Henson says they asked who was the least likely Muppet to play the author, and cast him.

In the 1988 film Scrooged, Bill Murray plays a modern-day Scrooge who works as what?

A TV network president: Murray's Frank Cross runs IBC and is staging a live Christmas Eve broadcast of the Dickens story when the ghosts arrive; Karen Allen plays his lost love Claire.

Which actor starred as Scrooge in the 1984 TV film of A Christmas Carol, shot in Shrewsbury?

George C. Scott's Scrooge left a mark on the town: the gravestone carved with the miser's name for the churchyard scene stayed behind at St Chad's in Shrewsbury and became a visitor attraction.

What technology was used to create the 2009 Disney film A Christmas Carol starring Jim Carrey?

Motion capture: Robert Zemeckis had used the same performance-capture technique on The Polar Express and Beowulf, and here it lets Jim Carrey play not only Scrooge but all three Christmas ghosts.

Which actor toured a one-man stage version of A Christmas Carol, playing every part, before a 1999 TV film?

Patrick Stewart developed the solo version because filming Star Trek left no time for a long stage run, and it reached Broadway in 1991.

Dickens worked out much of A Christmas Carol while doing what?

Walking at night: he covered fifteen or twenty miles through London's dark streets 'many and many a night' after sober folk had gone to bed, weeping and laughing over the story as it took shape.

What did Dickens set out to do for society by writing A Christmas Carol?

To protest child poverty: shaken by a visit to a ragged school for London's street children, Dickens conceived the story in October 1843, around a speech he gave in Manchester on educating the poor.

How does the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come typically appear?

A silent, hooded phantom that never speaks and answers only by pointing; Scrooge admits he fears it more than any spectre he has seen.

How does the Ghost of Christmas Present appear to Scrooge?

A giant in a green robe trimmed with white fur, he sits on a heap of Christmas food and carries a torch, sprinkling its incense on poor people's dinners because, he says, they need it most.

What is the famous opening line of A Christmas Carol?

'Marley was dead: to begin with', and Dickens hammers the point - 'dead as a door-nail' - because nothing wonderful can come of the story unless the reader is certain of it.

Where does Scrooge say the poor should go when two gentlemen ask him for a Christmas donation?

Prisons and workhouses: Scrooge says he already helps to support them, 'they cost enough', and 'those who are badly off must go there'; one collector answers that many would rather die.

What does Scrooge grudgingly grant his clerk on Christmas Eve?

A day off: Scrooge complains that he is the one ill-used when he must 'pay a day's wages for no work', and tells his clerk to 'be here all the earlier next morning'.

Scrooge's line that the poor should "decrease the surplus population" echoes which economist?

Thomas Malthus had warned that population tends to outrun the food supply; Dickens has a spirit turn the phrase back on Scrooge later, when he begs to know whether Tiny Tim will live.

Which piece of legislation does Scrooge ask two charity collectors about, hoping it is still in full vigour?

The Poor Law of 1834 made relief deliberately harsh, so that only the desperate would ask for it; Dickens had already attacked it in Oliver Twist, the tale of the orphan who asks for more.

In the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come's vision, what happens to Scrooge's belongings?

They are stolen and sold to a fence: his charwoman, laundress and the undertaker's man haggle over his bed-curtains, blankets and burial shirt at old Joe's rag-and-bone shop.

Who illustrated the first edition of A Christmas Carol?

John Leech, a Punch cartoonist, drew all eight pictures himself; on the four Christmas books that followed he had to share the work with other artists, John Tenniel among them.

Why did A Christmas Carol's sell-out first edition earn Dickens so little?

Lavish production costs: Dickens insisted on gilt edges, hand-coloured plates and coloured endpapers, then wrote that the first 6,000 copies showed a profit of £230 when he had 'set my heart and soul upon a Thousand, clear'.

For whom did Dickens insist on cheap seats at his first public readings of the Carol, in Birmingham?

Working people heard the Carol again at Birmingham Town Hall three nights after its first reading; those readings were for charity, but from 1858 Dickens toured as a paid reader of his own books.

Which two-word greeting, attested as early as 1534, is A Christmas Carol often credited with helping to popularise?

Merry Christmas: Bishop John Fisher wrote it from the Tower of London in 1534, and in the Carol Scrooge growls that anyone who says it 'should be boiled with his own pudding'.

Which fellow apprentice does Scrooge name when the Ghost of Christmas Past shows him his old workplace?

Dick Wilkins and the young Scrooge slept under a counter in the back-shop; seeing him again, old Scrooge says he 'was very much attached to me, was Dick'.

At the end of A Christmas Carol, what does the narrator say Scrooge became to Tiny Tim?

A second father: Dickens stresses that Tiny Tim 'did NOT die', and Scrooge also raises Bob Cratchit's salary, promising to talk it over that afternoon over a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop.

Which Disney character plays Marley's ghost in the 1983 featurette Mickey's Christmas Carol?

Goofy haunts Scrooge McDuck, a comic-book duck named after Dickens's miser in 1947 who here plays his namesake on screen; it was also Mickey Mouse's first cinema cartoon in thirty years.

What legal battle did Dickens fight soon after A Christmas Carol appeared?

A copyright suit against a pirate publisher: a condensed knock-off appeared in January 1844 and Dickens won in Chancery, yet he ended up paying his own costs, treated, he said, 'as if I were the robber instead of the robbed'.

In which parlour game at his nephew's party is Scrooge the secret subject, a "disagreeable animal"?

In Yes and No, the guests' questions narrow the animal to one that growls and grunts and lives in London: 'It's your Uncle Scro-o-o-o-oge!' Scrooge enjoys it so much he begs to stay.

In A Christmas Carol, what does Scrooge see in his own front-door knocker as he arrives home on Christmas Eve?

Marley's face, with 'a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar', appears in the knocker and then is a knocker again; Scrooge even checks behind the door for the pigtail.

Which of these Dickens works is one of his five Christmas Books?

The Cricket on the Hearth (1845) was the third of the five, after the Carol and The Chimes; Dickens chose it for his second public reading, in Birmingham in 1853, two nights after reading the Carol.

What drops onto the ghost's chest when Scrooge's late partner unwinds the bandage round his head in A Christmas Carol?

His lower jaw falls onto his breast the moment the wrapper comes off, removed as casually as if it were too warm to wear indoors. The sight drops Scrooge to his knees.

What does Scrooge first blame for the appearance of his late partner's ghost in A Christmas Carol?

A stomach upset, Scrooge insists, can make the senses cheat, so the ghost may be a crumb of cheese or an underdone potato. He is joking to keep down his own terror.

Which piece of ironmongery completes the narrator's simile about Scrooge's late partner as A Christmas Carol opens?

A door-nail is the proverbial choice, though the narrator admits he would have thought a coffin-nail the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. He lets the old saying stand.

Which bird, eked out with apple sauce and mashed potatoes, do the Cratchits share for dinner in A Christmas Carol?

Goose is such a rare treat that Bob says he doesn't believe there ever was such a bird cooked. Mrs Cratchit is delighted to find one small atom of a bone left on the dish.

Whose dinner does the reformed Scrooge join in A Christmas Carol, after passing the house a dozen times?

His nephew's house is where Scrooge spends the afternoon, once he finds the courage to knock. The scene of him calling on the Cratchits that day was added by later adaptations.

Which reassurance about Tiny Tim is absent from Dickens's manuscript of A Christmas Carol and was added during printing?

That he did not die appears only in a clause Dickens added to the second-to-last paragraph while the tale was at the printer's. His handwritten draft has no such words.

Which Muppet pair appear as the ghosts of Scrooge's two late partners in the 1992 film The Muppet Christmas Carol?

Statler and Waldorf, the old hecklers, share the part because the film gives Scrooge two late partners where Dickens wrote one. They visit him in chains on Christmas Eve.

Which weather has kept London dark all day when A Christmas Carol opens in Scrooge's office on Christmas Eve?

Fog pours in at every chink and keyhole, so dense that the houses across the narrow court are mere outlines. Dickens jokes that Nature must be brewing on a large scale nearby.

Into what does the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shrink and dwindle as Scrooge pleads to have his fate reversed?

A bedpost, and Scrooge's own: the dark figure collapses into it and he finds himself back in his bedroom. Even the bed-curtains he saw torn down are still on their rings.

What does Bob Cratchit try to warm himself with at work, since Scrooge keeps the coal-box in his own room?

A candle is all the clerk has, and Dickens notes drily that, not being a man of strong imagination, he fails. His own fire is so small that it looks like one coal.

Which invalid's supper does Scrooge take by a low fire, nursing a head cold, on the first night of A Christmas Carol?

Gruel waits in a little saucepan on the hob while Scrooge searches his rooms and double-locks himself in. He then sits brooding over a fire too small to give any warmth.

Which crime does Scrooge liken a paid Christmas Day off for his clerk to in A Christmas Carol?

Picking a man's pocket is how he puts it, sneering that once a year is no excuse. He still grants the holiday, on condition that Bob comes in all the earlier the next morning.

In the first vision shown by the Ghost of Christmas Past, where has the boy Scrooge been left alone for the holidays?

At his school, a decaying mansion of red brick, the boy sits reading by a feeble fire after his friends have ridden home. Old Scrooge weeps to see his forgotten self.

The Ghost of Christmas Past, white-haired yet unwrinkled, looks at once like an old man and like what?

A child is its other aspect: the skin has the tenderest bloom, though the hair is white as if with age. The figure also flickers, now with one arm, now with twenty legs.

Which wintry plant does the Ghost of Christmas Past hold in its hand, though summer flowers trim its dress?

Holly, a fresh green branch of it in the spirit's hand, clashes on purpose with the blooms on its white tunic. The narrator calls the pairing a contradiction of that wintry emblem.

What is the torch shaped like from which the Ghost of Christmas Present sprinkles incense on passing dinners?

A horn of plenty, the old emblem of abundance, fits a spirit enthroned on heaps of game, mince-pies and fruit. A few drops from it also restore good humour to quarrelling dinner-carriers.

In which London district, where Dickens lived as a boy, does Bob Cratchit's family have its four-roomed house?

Camden Town is where the Dickens family settled on moving to London in 1822. Bob runs home there on Christmas Eve after going down an ice slide twenty times.

Which Cratchit daughter, an apprentice at a milliner's, hides to tease her father when he comes home on Christmas Day?

Martha ducks out of sight so the family can pretend she isn't coming, then runs out because she can't bear to see Bob disappointed, even in joke.

After a miners' hut on a bleak moor, which sea-battered outpost does the Ghost of Christmas Present show Scrooge?

A lighthouse on a reef of sunken rocks shelters two keepers who join hands over a can of grog while one strikes up a sturdy song. The spirit then carries Scrooge on to a ship far out at sea.

At which parlour game does Topper seem to cheat, chasing only the plump sister, in A Christmas Carol?

Blind man's buff is a fix, the narrator suspects: the blindfolded Topper dodges everyone else and corners the plump sister behind the curtains. Bob Cratchit runs home to play it too.

Which instrument does Scrooge's niece by marriage play, reviving a tune his late sister knew, in A Christmas Carol?

The harp softens the unseen Scrooge: hearing the little air again, he thinks that listening to it years ago might have taught him the kindnesses of life. Topper growls the bass in the glees.

In which laundry vessel in the wash-house is the Cratchits' pudding boiled in A Christmas Carol?

The copper gives the pudding a smell like a washing-day as its cloth comes off. Mrs Cratchit then carries it in like a speckled cannon-ball, blazing in ignited brandy.

What title does Bob Cratchit give Scrooge in a Christmas toast that enrages Mrs Cratchit?

The Founder of the Feast is Bob's generous name for the man whose wages paid for the meal. His wife says she would rather give Scrooge a piece of her mind to dine on.

On what condition will one City businessman attend the unmourned man's funeral in A Christmas Carol's future vision?

If lunch is provided, says the gentleman with a growth on his nose, insisting he must be fed to make the trip. Another remarks that it is likely to be a very cheap funeral.

Which grey-haired dealer, nearly seventy, sits with his pipe among rags, bottles and bones in A Christmas Carol?

Old Joe has screened himself from the cold with a curtain of tatters hung on a line, beside a stove built of old bricks. The London quarter around his shop reeks of crime and filth.

Which ghostly vehicle does Scrooge think he sees climbing his wide, dark staircase ahead of him in A Christmas Carol?

A hearse could have gone up those stairs sideways with room to spare, the narrator says, which may be why Scrooge imagines one. He climbs on by a single dip, because darkness is cheap.

What is fastened to the ankle of the white-waistcoated ghost Scrooge sees from his window in A Christmas Carol?

An iron safe, monstrous in size, drags at a ghost Scrooge once knew, who weeps because he can no longer help a wretched woman and her baby. The air outside is full of such spirits.

Which carol does a frozen boy start singing through Scrooge's keyhole in A Christmas Carol?

God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen has barely begun when Scrooge grabs a ruler and the singer flees in terror. Dickens gives the boy a slightly altered wording of the old carol's opening.

In A Christmas Carol, the spirits are promised over three days; how quickly does Scrooge find they have come and gone?

All in one night, Scrooge realises when a boy in the street tells him it is still Christmas Day. He had been told to expect the second and third visitors on the following evenings.

Which hot spiced punch does the reformed Scrooge propose sharing with Bob Cratchit at the end of A Christmas Carol?

Smoking bishop was a Victorian favourite of port and red wine warmed with roasted oranges or lemons, sugar and cloves. Scrooge offers it while promising to raise Bob's salary.

In what kind of workplace did 12-year-old Dickens toil, an ordeal that fed the anger behind A Christmas Carol?

A blacking factory, dirty and overrun with rats, took him on in 1824, the year his father was jailed for debt in the Marshalsea. He had to give up his lessons and pawn his own library.

Which kind of charity for London's street youngsters did Dickens visit before writing A Christmas Carol?

A ragged school taught the capital's half-starved, illiterate street urchins. The one Dickens saw at Field Lane deepened the anger he had felt on touring Cornish tin mines.

After a fundraising speech in which northern English city did Dickens resolve to write A Christmas Carol?

Manchester heard him urge workers and employers to unite behind educational reform, at the Athenaeum that October. Within days he had decided a Christmas tale would reach further than any pamphlet.

How did Dickens, weeping and laughing as he went, compose much of A Christmas Carol in his head?

On long night walks of 15 to 20 miles around London, Dickens built the tale in his head before writing it down. By his own account he roamed the streets after all sober folk had gone to bed.

Which London firm issued A Christmas Carol months after threatening to cut Dickens's monthly income?

Chapman & Hall had warned they would dock him £50 a month if sales of his current serial kept falling. He left them soon afterwards for Bradbury and Evans, his printers.

Why did the first edition of A Christmas Carol, gone within days, earn Dickens under a quarter of what he expected?

Its lavish production costs, for the gilt edges, coloured plates and cloth binding he insisted on, swallowed the takings. He had hoped for £1,000 and cleared about £230.

Which American author's essays on old English Christmas customs influenced Dickens's A Christmas Carol?

Washington Irving described the festivities of an English country house in The Sketch Book, more than twenty years before Scrooge. Both writers hoped old customs could restore lost social bonds.

Which earlier Dickens novel holds the tale of Gabriel Grub, a sour sexton reformed by goblins, a forerunner of Scrooge?

The Pickwick Papers has Mr Wardle tell how goblins show the misanthropic gravedigger visions of past and future until he is converted. Dickens's biographer finds the Carol's main elements already there.

Which Dickens tale about an elderly ticket-porter named Trotty Veck followed A Christmas Carol a year later?

The Chimes is set on New Year's Eve, and its title came to Dickens in Italy when the clamour of Genoa's church bells struck him at his villa. Goblins of the bells show Trotty a grim future.

Which fellow novelist, writing in Fraser's Magazine, hailed A Christmas Carol as 'a national benefit'?

William Thackeray added that the tale was a personal kindness to every man or woman who read it. Nearly all the first reviews were just as warm.

Which reference work listed Dickens's 'Scrooge' as an ordinary word for a miser in 1982?

Oxford English Dictionary editors made the usage official almost 140 years after the tale appeared. By then the name had long been everyday shorthand for a skinflint.

In a much-repeated but unproven tale, Dickens took Scrooge's name from a merchant's gravestone in which city?

Edinburgh is where he supposedly misread 'meal man', a corn dealer's trade, as 'mean man' on the stone of one Scroggie. No evidence backs the tale, which has been called a probable hoax.

Shackled convicts whom Dickens saw in which American city in 1842 inspired the ghost of Scrooge's late partner?

Pittsburgh's Western Penitentiary, which he toured that March, affected him deeply with its fettered inmates. The memory resurfaced in a ghost weighed down by a lifetime of greed.

In which English city did Dickens read A Christmas Carol in 1853, insisting on quarter-price seats for workers?

Birmingham heard the reading in aid of its Industrial and Literary Institute, and it was a triumph. Dickens went on performing the tale until the year he died.

Which country's British-born queen, Maud, sent gifts to London's disabled youngsters signed 'With Tiny Tim's Love'?

Norway had taken Maud, a London-born daughter of the future Edward VII, as its queen. Her presents arrived in the early 1900s, some sixty years after Dickens invented the boy.

Which actor sang the lead in Scrooge, the 1970 musical film of A Christmas Carol co-starring Alec Guinness?

Albert Finney at first turned the part down, and Richard Harris and then Rex Harrison were signed before he changed his mind. The performance won him a Golden Globe.

Which director of The Polar Express went on to make Disney's 2009 film of A Christmas Carol?

Robert Zemeckis also wrote the script, and cast Jim Carrey as Scrooge and as all three of the spirits who visit him.

Which stage performer interpreted A Christmas Carol without words for the BBC series Omnibus in 1973?

Marcel Marceau, the French mime famous as Bip the Clown, took on the Dickens favourite. The tale has also been turned into operas and ballets.

Which old country dance do Scrooge's first employer and his wife lead at their ball in A Christmas Carol?

Sir Roger de Coverley, traditionally the last dance of an evening, brings the old couple out as top pair before some two dozen couples. In America it became the Virginia reel.

What does the Ghost of Christmas Past carry under its arm, which Scrooge finally jams down over its head?

An extinguisher cap, like an outsized snuffer, lets Scrooge press the spirit down to the floor, yet the light still streams out from under it in an unbroken flood. He then sinks into a heavy sleep.