Ebenezer Scrooge
fictional character in A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Ebenezer Scrooge () is a fictional character and the protagonist of Charles Dickens's 1843 novella A Christmas Carol. Initially a cold-hearted miser who despises Christmas, his redemption by visits from the ghost of Jacob Marley and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come has become a defining tale of the Christmas holiday in the English-speaking world.
Dickens describes Scrooge thus early in the story: "The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice." Throughout the novella, visits from the four ghosts show Scrooge the errors of his ways, and he transforms into a better, more generous man. Scrooge's last name has entered the English language as a byword for greed and misanthropy, while his catchphrase, "Bah! Humbug!" is often used to express disgust with many modern Christmas traditions.
Description
Charles Dickens describes Scrooge as "a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint... secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster." He does business from a Cornhill warehouse and is known among the merchants of the Royal Exchange as a man of good credit. Despite having considerable personal wealth, he underpays his clerk Bob Cratchit and hounds his debtors relentlessly while living cheaply and joylessly in the chambers of his deceased business partner, Jacob Marley. Most of all, he detests Christmas, which he associates with reckless spending.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q626756. VIAF identifies the subject as 316001196. The Library of Congress control number is no2015071252. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1843.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ebenezer Scrooge” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.