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The visitations do happen over the course of three days as seen by that Scrooge goes to bed at past two in the morning, the first two visitations have Scrooge awakening shortly after midnight, and ...

I think that by this point in the story, Scrooge can sense himself starting to reform. In this scene he is saying that had he devoted more time to paying attention to little, pleasant things like Fran'...

I think the play on words is a bit simpler than that. "Cultivate" is a word primarily used for gardening or farming, requiring a spade to turn the soil. Thus, Dickens is making a play on ...

This is the kind of slide that kids make by sliding on an icy pavement until it is smooth and slick. A smooth surface, esp. of ice, for sliding on, or formed by being slid on; a slippery place. OED ...

Dickens had a variety of motivations in writing A Christmas Carol. Financial. Dickens earned a living as an author, and sales of his previous novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, were slowing. As a result, his ...

A Bill of Exchange is a financial instrument which promised to pay money after a fixed period, was signed by the person drawing the instrument up and the 'acceptor', who was the person responsible ...

The sentence should be parsed as "I am standing, in spirit, at your elbow." Being with someone "in spirit" (or "in the spirit" as Dickens puts it) is the opposite of ...

Marley was the same as Scrooge before he died. It's for his sins that he's forced to walk the earth in torment as a ghost, a form of purgatory. Scrooge is saying that he had (and has, though that ...

There is no textual answer to this question. Instead, however, we can perhaps artifice one by looking at the religious beliefs of the author. The academic symposium The Dickens Project has this to say ...