Theme Of Compassion In A Christmas Carol

A Christmas Carol: Themes

Compassion & Forgiveness

Dickens, throughout the novella, wanted to convey compassion—something that many people within the higher-class didn’t fully understand, due to their ignorance of the impoverished classes beneath them. To be compassionate means to be aware of other’s suffering and misfortune; to be empathetic, to pity somebody or something. Dickens definitely wanted to portray this within A Christmas Carol to influence his readers to be more aware of those who were suffering, and to be more charitable.

Scrooge is initially depicted as a bitter, cold miser who shows absolutely no compassion whatsoever. There’s a distinct difference between those who show compassion, and those who don’t in the novella. For example,

He’s too preoccupied with money and wealth, and he has absolutely no regard for anybody else whatsoever. It is implied that Fred, from his insistence in Stave One, is persistent with his invitations, and that he invites Scrooge every year, despite Scrooge’s behaviour. In Stave Three, Fred says, ‘“I mean to give him the same chance every year, whether he likes it or not, for I pity him”’.

The readers are told at the beginning of the novella that Scrooge is ‘as solitary as an oyster’ and this links with the fact that Scrooge was a ‘solitary child, neglected by his friends’ who often chose books over socialising with other children. Not only was he neglected by his friends, Scrooge was also, in some sense, neglected by his father. He’d been sent away from home at a very important time of the year, and this obviously would have made the reader sad, knowing that Scrooge really didn’t have anybody whilst growing up.

Perhaps not only was Dickens trying to tell the readers that pushing away people and isolating yourself was bad, but it was also bad to neglect and dismiss people because it often led to people such as