Welcome to the Hillsdale College online courses podcast. I'm Jeremiah Regan and I'm Juan Davallos. We're on to lecture number two of Charles Dickens of Christmas Carol. And this lecture is titled Marley's Ghost, Bah Humbug.

So what kind of man is Scrooge?

He's the kind of man that says bah humbug.

That's kind of a charming and inventive way to be grumpy.

Yep.

That's one of the things I like very much. Actually, let me read from a page in the book

because I thought Dwight Lindley does a great job of describing him as somebody who is in a sense

likable, but at the same time relatable, but he goes, I think he goes too far. So I think this part describes him perfectly,

and it's when he's responding to the idea of somebody saying to him, Merry Christmas.

And so Scrooge says, what's Christmas time to you, but a time for paying bills without money,

a time for finding yourself a year older and not

an hour richer. So that's kind of relatable. But then he goes on to say, a time for balancing your

books and having every item in them through a round dozen of months presented dead against you.

If I could work my will, said Scrooge indignantly. 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.

He should.

So that's a bit too much.

That's a bit too much.

Well, and the way Dickens opens the book, there's kind of two starts.

There's the famous opening line, Marley was dead to begin with. Then we get a couple pages of Scrooge describing the death of his partner and one would think maybe his friend. And it's all very cold and calculating. We need to make sure we have all the signatures on his death warrant. Now let's analyze whether a nail is really the instantiation of something being truly dead,

et cetera, et cetera.

And then a few pages later, once upon a time and the action of the story starts.

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