Ebenezer Scrooge

Ebenezer Scrooge is the main protagonist and antagonist of the classic Charles Dickens novel A Christmas Carol.

Biography
The story of A Christmas Carol starts on Christmas Eve in 1843, with Scrooge at his money-lending business. Dickens refers to Scrooge as "... a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner!" Among his many flaws, he despises Christmas as a "humbug", and subjects his clerk, Bob Cratchit, to grueling hours at low pay. On Christmas Eve day, he rudely refuses his nephew Fred's Christmas dinner invitation, and turns away two charitable workers seeking donations for the poor.

While he is preparing to go to bed, he is visited by the ghost of his business partner, Jacob Marley, who had died seven years earlier on Christmas Eve. Like Scrooge, Marley had spent his life hoarding his wealth and exploiting the poor, and as a result is damned to walk the Earth for eternity bound in the chains of his own greed. Marley warns Scrooge that he risks meeting the same fate, and that as a final chance at redemption he will be visited by three spirits of Christmas: Past, Present, and Yet-to-Come.

The Ghost of Christmas Past takes Scrooge to see his time as a schoolboy and young man. These visions reveal that Scrooge was a lonely child whose unloving father sent him away to a boarding school. (In some film adaptations of the story, the ghost explains that Scrooge's mother died giving birth to him, for which his father blamed him.) His one solace was his beloved younger sister Fan, who repeatedly begged their father to allow Scrooge to return home, and he at last relented. Fan later died giving birth to her son, Fred. The spirit then takes him to see another Christmas a few years later in which he enjoyed a Christmas party held by his kind-hearted boss, Mr. Fezziwig. Then, the spirit shows him a Christmas in which his fiancée, Belle, leaves him as she realizes his love for money has replaced his love for her. Finally, the spirit shows him a Christmas Eve several years later, in which Belle is happily married to another man.

Scrooge is then visited by the Ghost of Christmas Present, who shows him the whole of London celebrating Christmas, including Fred and the impoverished Cratchit family. When Scrooge expresses concern for Cratchit's sickly son Tiny Tim, the spirit informs him that the boy will die unless something changes and uses Scrooge's earlier words about "decreasing the surplus population" against him. The spirit then produces two misshapen, sickly children he names Ignorance and Want. When Scrooge asks if they have anyone to care for them, the spirit throws more of Scrooge's own words back in his face: "Are there no prisons, no workhouses?"

The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shows Scrooge Christmas Day one year later. Just as the previous spirit predicted, Tiny Tim has died; his father could not afford to give him proper care on his small manager salary. The spirit then shows Scrooge scenes related to the death of a "wretched man": His business associates snicker about how it's likely to be a cheap funeral and one associate will only go if lunch is provided, his possessions are stolen and sold by his housekeeper, undertaker and laundress, and a young couple who owed the man money are relieved he is dead, as they have more time to pay off their debt. The spirit then shows Scrooge the man's tombstone: it bears Scrooge's name.

Scrooge weeps over his own grave, begging the spirit for a chance to change his ways, before awakening to find it is Christmas morning. He immediately repents and becomes a model of generosity and kindness: He visits Fred, gives Cratchit a raise, and becomes like "a second father" to Tiny Tim. As the final narration states, "Many laughed to see this alteration in him, but he let them laugh and little heeded them, for he knew that no good thing in this world ever happened, at which some did not have their fill of laughter. His own heart laughed and that was quite enough for him. And it was always said of him that he knew how to keep Christmas well if any man alive possessed the knowledge."