The Themes
Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is one of the most loved stories of all time. And ‘Time’ and how we understand it is one of its major themes. In the story as told by Dickens, time collapses. The time Scrooge is away with Spirits is not as in most adaptations just one night but in fact, as Dickens makes clear, the whole Christmas season of twelve days, if not longer. The time Scrooge is away with the Spirits cannot be measured by minutes, hours and days. It is clear though that that is exactly how Scrooge does think of time, that is, as something that should and can only be measured by the ticking clocks and the chiming of bells on the hour, both heavily featured in the original narrative.