The family in A Christmas Carol whose plight helps to bring about Scrooge’s change of heart is the Cratchits, the father of whom works for Scrooge. Tiny Tim was not the original name for the little boy in Dickens’s novella: originally he was going to be called ‘Little Fred’, possibly after one of Dickens’s brothers, two of whom were called Frederick and Alfred.
The tale shares many of the narrative features which would turn up a few years later in A Christmas Carol: the misanthropic villain, the Christmas Eve setting, the presence of the supernatural (goblins/ghosts), the use of visions which the main character is forced to witness, the focus on poverty and family, and, most importantly, the reforming of the villain into a better person at the close of the story. He’d already written ‘The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton’, featuring miserly Gabriel Grub, an inset tale in Dickens’s first ever published novel, The Pickwick Papers (1836-7). It wasn’t even the first Christmas ghost story Dickens wrote.
It wasn’t the first Christmas story Dickens wrote.
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