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Ebenezer Scrooge — Description

Ho ho hell yeah it's December bitches! Dear Santa, all Mama wants for Christmas is a woman scented like the whiff of a smoggy bonfire and cheap holiday sweaters xoxo <3
That's the only joke you're getting out of me for a hot minute, because today we're discussing the often neglected sin against the human experiment which is child labor. The historical context behind A Christmas Carol is extremely dark and relevantly necessary to discuss in cold, bitter tones, not despite the holiday season, but because it's the holiday season. There's approximately 6 million minors employed in the United States labor force in 2025. That's about one twelfth of our entire population of people under the age of eighteen currently breaking their backs and taking abuse in a job market designed for adults who already can't handle the things we do to each other for money, not without an excessive amount of Xanax and Tylenol that is. I find that a disgusting statistic. I'm an extremely vocal advocate for the idea that children should not be in the workforce. At all. Developing children who don't even have a fully developed frontal lobe yet should not be put through such a toxic environment as, say, retail or food service. They have a hard enough time learning to cope with the reality of being turned into sentient meat without their consent. Anyone eighteen or younger (hell I'd personally argue twenty-six or younger) should be in school, their squishy minds given care and attention to ensure that once every single one of them does reach adulthood, that traumatic time when we abandon them to the horrors of human society as their elders have constructed it for them, they will be the best and brightest representatives of species Homo sapiens. They need to be made ready, either to participate in the world, or to tear the fucking thing down to its rotten ashes. I want children to grow up understanding that this is their fucking planet and that they have not only the goddamn right, but also the power to leave the old ways to die. We have to make that promise to our youth, which is why it breaks my heart to see high schoolers making up half of our bagging staff at the grocery store. I'm only 26 and I sure as shit can't handle the world on my shoulders. I could not imagine how stressful it must be for these poor shrimps to have to support their families on top of themselves. No child should ever have to worry about whether or not they or their family can eat this week.
Sadly, we live in a cesspool polluted by gross old men who have no financial interest in keeping tiny hands out of the factories. As of 2025, the 1% of the entire American population is stingily keeping a whopping 30% of the entire nation's wealth from the rest of us 336 million peasants. While in itself an improvement over the 75% hogged by the richest elite of the Victorian Age, it's a 30% which is approaching that dystopian economy, not receding from it. It starts with convincing parents their children need “experience” for the "real world", because surely their kids were just never gonna be good enough to succeed educationally, right? Gotta teach them to be submissive early, after all. Then it ends with seven-year old James Burkinshaw drowning in the Huskar Pit with 25 other children who'd barely hit puberty, all to extract lung-blackening coal from the Devil's teeth for 12 hours each day, all for one measly sixpence per day. That was in 1838. Charles Dickens was my age, and he'd just published Oliver Twist. He knew for himself the horrors of child labor. After his father got thrown in debtor's prison, Dickens had to spend three years feeding his family in a shoe-blackening factory, ages 12 to 15 robbed from his life by toxic fumes and authoritarian overseers.
Dickens was there, on the work floor. He knew he was one of the lucky ones who could move on to more fulfilling destinies. He'd always keep a finger on the pulse of the issue, and it broke his heart when that pulse got weaker and smokier with each heartbeat. He didn't have to languish in prison for owing a baker 40 quid like his father had. He wasn't one of those pox-ridden unfortunates who died alone and abused in one of England's many filthy workhouses. These facilities were standardized in 1834, on the surface offering the disenfranchised unemployed a place to stay in exchange for labor. The sneaky thing that turned these workhouses into places where the poor were expected to dig their own graves, however, was that their infrastructure was designed in conjunction with the Poor Law Amendment Act. Poor people were, to Parliament, a problem that had to be solved, not for the poors’ sake of course, but for the wealthy aristocrats who didn't like seeing dirty homeless people on their streets. Prime Minister Charles Grey's solution was deliberately evil, as most acts of government are. The Poor Law Amendment Act completely shut off government relief for low income families. Grey was a student of Reverend Thomas Malthus, you see, so he'd gotten it into his head that feeding your citizens would just be unsustainably expensive. They thought that if you gave poor people food, it would trigger runaway overpopulation and leave everyone to starve. So instead if they wanted food, those “lazy poor” would have to work for it with their own bare hands in the workhouses and figure out the rest from there, all on their own. Approximately a million people starved to death in Ireland shortly thereafter, incidentally. Fine by us if the workhouses are over capacity, Earl Gray thought, there were plenty more in Australia, and if they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Gee, it leaves one to ponder: if the government is so gung ho about doing literally nothing at all for its citizens that they publicly declare that they won't lift a finger for anyone but themselves, then what, pray tell, is the purpose of having a government in the first place?
Now Dickens was no anarchist, but he was at least an advocate for children's rights. In the spring of 1843, he'd read a parliamentary report, aghast at interviews with coal miners and spinstresses, who hadn't even hit double digits yet, breaking their backs for 16 hours a day, all so some nameless stuffy madame can flaunt six layers of clothing while her flock of nobodies can titter gossip by a warm fire. I hear tell of a guy so rich, he lives in a house, with chairs! I mean who has ever even heard of such a thing? The fact that I still have to be a sarcastic bitch about the death of community in 2025 probably would've shattered Dickens. There was very little he could do as a starving artist himself, his dwindling paycheck entirely dependant on banging out a best-seller every few years, but he felt in his soul that he must be able to do something. Initially, he had intended to take the information in that parliamentary report and turn it into a more digestible pamphlet, that awareness might be distributed until it reached someone who actually had the power and the heart to do anything at all about it. No though, his author's brain itched. People throw away pamphlets. People are inspired by books.
He knew it was time for his next best-seller, but he wouldn't get the flash of inspiration to pump one out until October 1843. Dickens had been invited to speak, alongside the likes of future Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, at the Manchester Athenaeum. This was basically a giant clubhouse for nerds who cared about nerd shit like “public education” and “worker's rights”, similar to the Children's Museum I work for, except of course we are infinitely cooler because we have a T. rex you can come touch. Here Dickens got his gears whirring over imploring how desperately our species needs mass education at all levels of society, a message that has my full support. No like for real please, I'm dropping the act to drill this into your skull: if you take anything away from my blog, let it be the objective fact that mass education is lifeblood and we will not get any farther as a species without it. Support public school funding please, for the love of the gods and everything it means to be human. I cannot stress this enough, nor could Dickens. He finally realized what his story was going to be about. A staggeringly brief six weeks after his talk at Manchester, A Christmas Carol was completed, because Charles Dickens is the sort of genius fucking maniac I wish I could emulate as an artist and a writer.
Published just in time for its holiday deadline, on December 19, 1843, the timeless magic of A Christmas Carol speaks for itself. It has never once been out of print, and I'm sure each and every single one of you out there can cite an adaptation you've singled out as your favorite to watch every year. Its staying power is rooted in the journey taken through the soul of Ebenezer Scrooge, a caricature so miserly that his name has become a byword for crotchety old dick weasels for whom such things as “fun” and “generosity” are wastes of time and money. Dickens had fished the name out of a memory from June 1841, when he'd been passing through Edinburgh and came across a crumbling tombstone bearing the inscription “Ebenezer Scroggie, mean man, died 1836”. Damn, Dickens thought, that's cold. “It must have shrivelled his soul to be remembered through eternity only for being mean… a life wasted”. It was exactly the sort of blunt, final commentary on the futility of evil which Dickens wanted to encapsulate in his OC. Though… that headstone didn't actually say “mean man”, that was just a trick of the twilight. The real inscription was “meal man”, a reference to Ebenezer Scroggie's very prolific grain business. Ironically, the real Ebenezer Scroggie was a community sweetheart, a jovial sort of Santa Claus who'd put a Benjamin in your pocket and then still buy you a beer afterwards. Then again, maybe that irony is itself a commentary on the whiffling nature of a forgotten life. I know I'd be pretentious enough to claim that was the intention all along.
You, everyone, and that dog that's just a cancerous genital parasite all know that Ebenezer Scrooge was not that sort of fellow. He's a geriatric icicle of a man, cuddly as a cactus and charming as an eel, a man who won't even light a fire to warm his offices because, to use Dickens’ punctual phrasing, “darkness is cheap”. His naively loyal clerk, Mr. Bob Cratchit, has to settle for a little candle, a lump of coal, and a ratty scarf to keep him warm on Christmas Eve. Cratchit never complained. He knew what use that'd be. He was just grateful to be indoors, earning money, piddling and insufficient as fifteen shillings a week may be. Now more than ever, he needed to know his place, unlike Scrooge's nephew Fred, who let the cold in with his sudden intrusion of “Merry Christmas!” and “God save you!”, obnoxious child.
“Bah!” said Scrooge, “Humbug!”
Fred came all this way in a miserable English winter just to pester his equally miserable uncle with a dinner invitation they both knew the old miser wouldn't accept. The reasons why he would waste oxygen on such a proposal are as unparsable to Scrooge as his explanation for getting married. “Because I fell in love”, Fred chirped, as if that were the singular obvious motive anyone could ever need. Foolish boy, scoffed Scrooge, surely one day you'll be taught a hard lesson by that old ball and chain. Scrooge will be gadflied no further. Still, his nephew insisted he has no quarrel with him, and so bid him a friendly adieu, and another Merry Christmas. Between this perturbance, the grubby almsgivers, and the out-of-tune carolers making noise at the ungodly hour of closing time, Bob Cratchit was honestly lucky he'd successfully negotiated for getting Christmas off. Although grant it, Scrooge only granted him this permission on the condition that he hustle his happy ass into work extra early the next day, but that's good enough for Cratchit to clock out on.
As for Scrooge, he trudged back to his lair that night, minding the cold about as much as a seal snack. Christmas Eve wore down his tolerance for chucklefuck after chucklefuck begging charity from him, each and every parasite offering nothing tangible in exchange but hollow smiles, empty promises, and memories he was determined to muzzle until his own miserable demise. As if he hadn't surrendered enough of his happiness already… That's probably why he let Cratchit off, honestly. Cratchit never asked anything of Scrooge. It was those two gentlemen who came in panning for alms that really poked at his soul in a way he didn't appreciate. Scrooge hadn't updated the sign on his warehouse office at any point in the past seven years, and most people had enough wits about themselves to never question it. These two charity workers, however, had not gotten the memo, and presumptively asked what donations they could inquire out of Scrooge and Marley. “Nothing!” Scrooge replied for his part. He didn't owe anyone anything, least of all strangers who had never helped him through his troubles. As for Marley… well, Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that…
Design notes, godsdammit I can't get the fucking DuckTales song out of my head- Screw you, Mouse. Anyway drawing main human characters from historical literature can be a massive pain in the ass, because they often suffer from what I term “some-guy-ism”, and the Victorian Age is one of the worst offenders in this category. Scrooge (by intent, in all fairness) doesn't really have any descriptors to his appearance that could help me along. He's just a crotchety old man whose nice clothes were probably all gifted to him because he's channeling too much Mr. Krabs energy to spend a cent on them himself. That's kinda the vibe I tried to roll with here, expensive yet unrefined. Admittedly this design philosophy did kinda run away from me when it came to designing his sleep clothes, but in all fairness, everyone should have a nice cozy set of jammies. I'm a dirt poor peasant and even I sleep in my nicest elf dress. Do I feel bad about that? Yes, but I hope the vendor I bought it from knows it's becoming worn and tattered only because it's loved so much. And hey, we're doing Christmas Carol this year. Hopefully by the end you'll all have your hearts aligned to a similar mentality~