ENGL 5562: Victorian Literature
Dr. Sigler

Discussion Questions for Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol (1843)

**As you read, please jot down in your notebook a list of references (with page numbers) to children, childhood, and childlike characters to share with the class.

1. What makes Christmas such an effective setting for the kind of humanitarian issues Dickens was trying to address?

2. In what ways does Dickens portray Scrooge as isolated—from his family, coworkers, from the rest of humanity, even from himself?

3. In what ways is Scrooge clearly a Utilitarian?

4. One major theme in A Christmas Carol was rooted in Dickens' observations of the plight of the children of London's poor. What are some examples of the theme of "childlikeness" at work in this story? What is Dickens using children/childhood/childlikeness to say about the state of Victorian society in the "hungry forties"?

5. What specific events lead to Scrooge's reformation? In particular, at what point do we first begin to see him change?

6. In what ways does Tiny Tim serve as the thematic center of A Christmas Carol? (How does he connect all the major characters/symbols/themes in this novella?)

7. In Stave Three, why is Scrooge so moved by—and terrified of—the children, "Ignorance and Want"? Why does the spirit tell him to "most of all beware [Ignorance]" (1500)?

8. In what ways does the novella's concluding stave reflect and comment upon the opening?

9. What kinds of comedy do we see at work in A Christmas Carol? Whom or what is Dickens satirizing in this work?

A short—and quite different—version of A Christmas Carol appears as an interpolated tale called "The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton" in Dickens's novel, The Pickwick Papers (1837). It makes an interesting comparison with A Christmas Carol. You can read it online by clicking on the story title.