A famous Victorian Xmas story, A Christmas Carol was published on 17 December 1843 and became an instant hit selling 5,000 copies by Christmas Eve. It tells the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, a rich and mean old man with no friends who hates Christmas. On Christmas Eve, Scrooge is visited by three Spirits of Christmases Past, Present and Future and what they show him make him change his ways.
Bah! Humbug!
“Bah Humbug” is one of the best quotes of A Christmas Carol and certainly the most enduring. Of all Dickens quotes from this Victorian Xmas story this is the most memorable. “Bah! Humbug!” is the response of Ebenezer Scrooge to his nephew’s wishing him a merry Christmas.
A Christmas Carol, Dickens Quotes
Ebenezer Scrooge is described by Dickens in the beginning of this Victorian Xmas story as "hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire”. Scrooge is a “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scarping, clutching, covetous old sinner”, and “self-contained and solitary as an oyster” who “carried his own low temperature always about with him”.
The great quotes that follow were taken from the Puffin Classics edition of A Christmas Carol, published by Penguin Books in 2008:
- “What reason have you to be merry? You’re poor enough”, says Ebenezer Scrooge to his nephew. To which Scrooge’s nephew replies: “What reason have you to be morose? You’re rich enough”.
- What’s Christmas time... but a time for paying bills without money. (Scrooge)
- Every idiot who goes about with Merry Christmas on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. (Scrooge)
- There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited. (Scrooge’s nephew)
- If [the poor] would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. (Scrooge)
- There is nothing on which [the world] is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth. (Scrooge)
- I should have liked to have had the lightest licence of a child, and yet been man enough to know its value.
- It is always the person not in the predicament who knows what ought to have been done.
- God bless us every one! (Little Tim, Dickens character in Christmas Carol)
- While there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humour.
- He frightened every one away from him when he was alive, to profit us when he was dead!
- Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead. But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change.
- I will honour Christmas in my heart and try to keep it all the year. I will in the Past, Present and the Future.
- I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a school-boy. I am as giddy as a drunken man. A merry Christmas to everybody!
- It was a splendid laugh, a most illustrious laugh. The father of a long, long line of brilliant laughs!
- Nothing ever happened on this globe for good at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset.
And A Christmas Carol concludes: "And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One!
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Lito Apostolakou - Lito is a historian with an interest in digital archives and online historical resources. She is the author of blog Palimpsest.
