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 the five staves in place of chapters, which give the novella the shape of a carol.
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.
OCR's question on this novel is one essay, from a choice of two, for 40 marks: an extract-based question on the printed extract and the novel elsewhere, or a discursive question on a view of the novel, using at least two moments. Response (AO1) and language, form and structure (AO2) carry the most weight and equal weight, context (AO3) counts when it is relevant to the question, and 4 marks are for vocabulary, sentence structures, spelling and punctuation (AO4). An extract-based answer that never leaves the extract, or a discursive answer built on one moment, cannot go above Level 3. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the question it is for.
