With Christmas fast approaching, it’s time for another holiday-themed exercise! Today, I’m continuing my advanced reading exercise series with the opening from a very famous Christmas story, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. I previously discussed the cultural impact of this book on the website here, but now we’ll take a dive into some of the writing itself.

Dickens is an interesting writer to look at for English. By today’s standards, his prose is rather grand and his sentences sometimes very long, so this may be difficult to read. However, by the standards of his time he was actually quite an accessible writer, and his themes and style helped modernise writing. Though his sentences are very long, with many descriptive words (and some rather archaic uses of semi-colons), his writing is also quite simple in structure and his vocabulary is either simple or uses words that are well worth learning!

As before with these exercises, we’ll take a look how some of the specific language works, but this is a piece that you may benefit from merely reading through trying to understand the descriptions. And if you’d like to read more of this classic story, it is available free online, here. It is worth continuing, or otherwise finding in film form, not least because the story starts in a negative way, but this is only the beginning, and Scrooge must, eventually, appreciate Christmas!

Useful Vocabulary

Here are some words that may be useful to understand the passage (though you may need to look up some more!):

Biting (weather): sharp, bitter or otherwise nasty
Chink: a very small gap in something
Dingy: gloomy or otherwise miserable
Dismal: sad, glum or miserable
Gaily: happily, with joy (rather old-fashioned)
Humbug: used in the past to refer to fraud/lies, though it has come (through this story) to be considered a general exclamation of displeasure
Intimation: indication or hint
Palpable: something that can be felt, or is almost physical
Phantoms: spirits/ghosts
Replenish: restore, restock or revive
Ruddy: reddish colour
Spur of the moment: in that instant
Wheezing: breathing heavily

Reading Exercise: A Christmas Carol (Extract)

Read the following extract from A Christmas Carol and consider the questions below.

Once upon a time—of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve—[1] old Scrooge sat busy in his counting-house. It was cold, bleak, biting weather: foggy, and he could hear the people in the court outside, go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their breasts, and stamping their feet upon the pavement stones to warm them. The city clocks had only just gone three, but it was quite dark already—it had not been light all day—and candles were flaring in the windows of the neighbouring offices, like ruddy smears upon the palpable brown air. The fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was so dense without, that although the court was narrow, the houses opposite were mere phantoms. To see the dingy cloud come drooping down, obscuring everything, one might have thought that Nature lived hard by, and was brewing on a large scale.[2]

The door of Scrooge’s counting-house was open that he might keep his eye upon his clerk,[3] who in a dismal little cell beyond, a sort of tank, was copying letters. Scrooge had a very small fire, but the clerk’s fire was so very much smaller that it looked like one coal.[4] But he couldn’t replenish it, for Scrooge kept the coal-box in his own room; and so surely as the clerk came in with the shovel, the master predicted that it would be necessary for them to part. The clerk put on his white comforter, and tried to warm himself at the candle; in which effort, not being a man of a strong imagination, he failed.[5]

“A merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!” cried a cheerful voice.[6] It was the voice of Scrooge’s nephew, who came upon him so quickly that this was the first intimation he had of his approach.[7]

“Bah!” said Scrooge, “Humbug!”

He had so heated himself with rapid walking in the fog and frost, this nephew of Scrooge’s,[8] that he was all in a glow; his face was ruddy and handsome; his eyes sparkled, and his breath smoked again.

“Christmas a humbug, uncle!” said Scrooge’s nephew. “You don’t mean that, I am sure?”

“I do,” said Scrooge. “Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry? You’re poor enough.”

“Come, then,” returned the nephew gaily.[9] “What right have you to be dismal? What reason have you to be morose? You’re rich enough.”

Scrooge, having no better answer ready on the spur of the moment, said, “Bah!” again; and followed it up with “Humbug.”

“Don’t be cross, uncle!” said the nephew.

“What else can I be,” returned the uncle, “when I live in such a world of fools as this? Merry Christmas! Out upon merry Christmas! What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in ’em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will,”[10] 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. He should!”

“Uncle!” pleaded the nephew.

“Nephew!” returned the uncle sternly, “keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine.”

Discussion Questions

Why is this phrase put between dashes?
Why is Nature capitalised?
Is there a word missing in this sentence that would help it make sense?
Why does Dickens write “so very much smaller”?
Why does the clerk’s lack of imagination mean he fails to get warm?
What does “cried” mean here?
What does “the first intimation of his approach” refer to?
Why is “this nephew of Scrooge’s” in commas, at this point in the sentence?
What does it mean that the nephew “returned”?
What does it mean for Scrooge to “work his will”?

Answers and Points for Discussion

This is additional information, clarifying the exact day after the vague “once upon a time”; the dashes work like parentheses here.
Nature is given a capital letter to make it sound more important and like a respected, almost living entity, considered as a whole. (It is, essentially, personification of Nature as a concept.)
It would read more grammatically to say “door was open so that he could . . .”; not using the connector is a rather archaic, fairly poetic way to structure this.
“so very much” uses three adverbs to create extra emphasis; this is a dramatic way of phrasing it, and works as a comparative to “very small” earlier in the sentence.
This is clever phrasing from Dickens, as it suggests with enough imagination a person could be warmed by a candle. He acknowledges that it is not a realistic thing to do, but rather than say it was not possible, the text instead blames the clerk’s inner traits, creating a sense of how sad the clerk’s attitude might be, or how Scrooge might harshly judge him.
“Cried” is used in this sentence to mean “cried out”, essentially to call out, shout or say something loudly – not to cry in sadness.
It refers to the nephew’s speech; the first hint Scrooge had that he was there was hearing him talk.
The phrase defines the subject, “he”, used throughout the sentence, but comes later, in commas, as additional information. The explanation of his actions and the results are described first, setting the scene, before clarifying who we are referring to.
“Returned” is used here to mean “replied/responded”, i.e. he returned a response of his own to what was said to him.
To do as he would like to.