Themes Encountered Throughout Charles Dickenss A Christmas Carol In the timeless tale, A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens focuses upon the extreme transformation of a character named Ebenezer Scrooge. The fact that several moralistic themes can be applied throughout the novel confirms why it is a classic.The first significant alteration of Scrooges character occurred when he was a young man, as he became increasingly involved in the occupation of business, where wealth and assets are subjects of great examination and often possessiveness. Described and portrayed as an avaricious, bitter, and solitary man, Scrooge is introduced as critically immoral, occupied constantly by business. Christmas, as the faithful celebrate it, is referred to by Scrooge as a humbug, or fraud. On the topic of a merry Christmas, as his nephew related to it, Scrooge declared that an individual as poor as Fred has little or nothing to be merry about. In one of the most disturbing quotations from Scrooge, he casually remarks to two gentlemen requesting donations for the poor, if [idle people] would rather die [than attend prisons and workhouses], they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population (11). Scrooge accuses Bob Cratchit of being greedy for requesting Christmas as a day to retreat from work to be with his family, when in fact it is he who is greedy, essentially concerned with profits, not people. Orally, this point is perhaps best illustrated in the Past when the girl he once loved more than money, Belle, declared that, a [golden] idol has displaced me (37). Fully aware that Scrooges priorities are deranged, and he has been degraded to worship wealth rather than valuing the qualities of human love, Belle leaves him.The intensification of Scrooges wrongdoing leads to the apparitions and chilling noises that spook him, and eventually force him to acknowledge the magnitude of his sins. The first occasion on which the reader witnesses th...
