A Christmas Carol

"Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry? You're poor enough."

To see the dingy cloud come drooping down, obscuring everything,

No beggars implored him to bestow a trifle,

Old Marley was as dead as a doornail.

squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner

The sky was gloomy, and the shortest streets were choked up with a dingy mist, half thawed, half frozen, whose heavier particles descended in a shower of sooty atoms, as if all the chimneys in Great Britain had, by one consent, caught fire, and were blazing away to their dear heart’s content.

Preface
I have endeavoured in this ghostly little book to raise the ghost of an Idea which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their house pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it.

Their faithful Friend and Servant,

C. D.

December, 1843.

merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!” cried a cheerful voice. 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.

“Oh! captive, bound, and double-ironed,” cried the phantom, “not to know that ages of incessant labour, by immortal creatures, for this earth must pass into eternity before the good of which it is susceptible is all developed!

Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry? You’re poor enough.”