Scrooge in his counting-house, Fred's visit, the charity collectors, Bob Cratchit, and Marley's Ghost.
How Dickens presents Scrooge before his transformation, with key quotations.
Key quotations: 'Marley was dead: to begin with', 'squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner', 'Hard and sharp as flint', 'solitary as an oyster', 'Are there no prisons?', 'decrease the surplus population', 'a poor excuse for picking a man's pocket every twenty-fifth of December', 'fellow-passengers to the grave', 'I wear the chain I forged in life', 'Mankind was my business'.
Methods: the narrator speaking directly to the reader, the fog and cold, and 'stave' meaning a verse of a song, so the five chapters are the carol's verses.
Context: Malthus and 'surplus population', the 1834 Poor Law and the workhouses, and why Dickens wrote the novella in 1843.
How Stave Three turns Scrooge's own words back on him.
