A Christmas Carol and the weather
How does Dickens represent Scrooge in this extract?
How does Dickens use the weather to represent mood elsewhere in the novel?
In this extract, Scrooge is represented as closed, emotionally unavailable and cold. Dickens uses an excessive amount of description and metaphor to show the extent to which Scrooge’s personality goes against nature, and, by implication, God. In other staves, Dickens uses the weather and atmosphere to reflect the mood of other characters and as a contrast to the heavy, cold and hard personality of Scrooge that he has established in this passage and elsewhere in the first stave.
Dickens’ first metaphor has Scrooge as a ‘tight-fisted hand,’ closed up and ready to strike, like a ‘fist’. The ‘grindstone’ literally refers to a tool for sharpening knives but is a well-known metaphor for enforced hard work. Many writers would contain themselves to a list of three adjectives, but that isn’t enough for Dickens, who uses a list of six verbal adjectives for Scrooge which also have the effect of making it seem like Scrooge is performing these verbs: ‘squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching [and] covetous’. This excessive description is typical of Dickens and here contributes to a sense of Scrooge as the epitome of unpleasant miserliness. Dickens goes on to associate Scrooge with ‘flint’ and ‘steel’, both substances that are known for being cold, hard and sharp. However, it is the following set of associations – of Scrooge with cold weather – that are probably the most startling. Scrooge’s features are frozen – not from external cold, but by the ‘cold within him’. Dickens uses three verbs to show how this internal cold ‘nipped … shrivelled and stiffened’ the old man, affecting how he looked and even walked. Dickens reinforces this idea of Scrooge as his own source of cold as he ‘carried his own low temperature always with him’. Many writers might feel that all of this is sufficient to present a character as emotionally and morally empty, but not Dickens. He goes on to explore all the types of weather that have ‘no’ effect on Scrooge: ‘no warmth … no wintry weather … no wind … no falling snow … no pelting rain’ could alter him in any way. So why is Dickens quite so excessive in his description of this character? Pathetic fallacy in Dickens’ hands does so much more than just associate a character’s mood with the weather. In Dickens’ world, Scrooge’s mood, his whole persona, becomes the bad weather. He is a walking cloud of cold, hard, misery, infecting everyone around him. When we consider that for A Christmas Carol to teach the profound moral lesson that Dickens wants us to learn, we need to understand that Scrooge is the worst kind of miser. He is not just ungenerous, he withholds love and money to such a degree that it turns him entirely in on himself. He is an emotional black-hole, dementor-like, sucking all joy and warmth from the world.
Given this extreme use of bad weather associated with Scrooge in the novel, other uses of the weather have to be seen in sympathy with, or in contrast to, Scrooge. During the ‘Christmas Past’ stave, there are instances of weather and the atmosphere used to contrast with Scrooge. At one point the ‘air’ is personified as ‘laughing’ to hear the ‘merry music’ as Scrooge looks back on his childhood Christmas at school. In this representation of Christmas, even the ‘air’ is able to be happy, so surely the same must have been true for young Scrooge?
Later on, Fezziwig’s workshop is described as ‘snug and warm and dry and bright’, clearly setting the scene for the cheerful and generous ball held by the Fezziwigs. These happy settings go a long way to establishing the generous opposite to Scrooge; everything they are, he is not. We know that even the sun’s warmth can’t touch him, symbolically suggesting that God’s light can’t warm him either. Dickens is clearly establishing a moral world where all that is dark and cold is associated with the lack of Christian charity and all that is light and bright is associated with generous Christian values.
We see this association quite clearly in the final stave where Scrooge’s transformation is complete. He opens his windows on to a world where there is ‘no fog, no mist, clear, bright, jovial, stirring cold… Golden sunlight; Heavenly sky, sweet fresh air’. The description of ‘no fog, no mist’ reminds the reader of the Scrooge from the first stave who carried around his own atmosphere of cold and misery. However, the adjectives that follow show us how now, Scrooge is seeing with moral clarity. The injustices of the world are ‘bright’ before him. By capitalising ‘Golden’ and ‘Heavenly’, Dickens is explicitly referencing the Christian ideas that he believes Scrooge is now displaying. This Scrooge is basking in God’s light.
In conclusion, we see Dickens using description and pathetic fallacy to make Scrooge into a cartoon-like image of a moral vacuum of misery and coldness. He is a character utterly devoid of Christmas cheer and, by extension, Christian charity. Dickens clearly wanted to prick the consciences of Victorian industrialists and financiers who profited from the hard work of the underpaid Victorian poor. His excessive, cartoonish Scrooge may have been effective in reflecting the attitudes of some, but it may have had the effect of allowing some others to sit back and say, ‘well, at least I’m not as bad as Scrooge!’
Written in about 45 minutes (although I planned for about 15 minutes before that). See the planning here.
