From Stave 2 — The First of the Three Spirits

…The final scenes show us Belle, Scrooge’s ex-fiancée. Scrooge is now in the prime of life. His (reasonable) fear, when younger, of being poor has now become an unreasonable love of money. Belle releases Scrooge from his engagement because she can see that he no longer loves her. He has not asked her to break the engagement but does not object to her decision. Another glimpse of Belle follows. Some years later – seven years before the present, she sits with her daughter. (At first Scrooge thinks the daughter is Belle, but she is now older. She has other children, too. Her husband tells her how he saw Scrooge that day, working alone in his office, while his partner, Marley, was lying “upon the point of death”. Scrooge contrasts his life with hers and her husband’s. While they have a happy Christmas together, he is working alone. They are not wealthy as he is but not poor financially. In other ways they are far richer than he. Scrooge thinks of how good it would be to have a daughter like Belle’s to look up to him.

Dickens meant the e book as satire on the Scrooge type (who by the variety replaced into no longer unique to the Victorian era which money owed for the radical’s lasting attractiveness.) His speech to the alms creditors approximately “reducing the excess inhabitants” replaced into so stunning as to be humorous. Fezziwig is the two an admirable (in his being completely opposite to Scrooge) and humorous. The mandatory topic is a severe one. And Dickens wrings all the pathos he probable can from Tiny Tim. The happy ending, Scrooge’s astonishing turn around, makes the humorous facet of the e book stand out. If it had ended with Tiny Tim gasping his final on the streets of London, the e book could have been a tragedy.