opening scene<\/a> of the story, the sole living proprietor of Scrooge and Marley doesn\u2019t allow more than one lump of coal to warm his poor, shivering clerk\u2019s work area. He also frequently insults and threatens to fire his employee, and holds his near-poverty over his head.<\/p>\nScrooge answers his visiting nephew\u2019s \u201cMerry Christmas! God save you!\u201d with what in 1843 must have been a shocking \u201cBah! Humbug!\u201d (This would be \u201cBah! BS!\u201d or worse in modern American English. The word means nonsense, but it's a bit rougher.) He mocks love as a reason for his relation\u2019s marriage. He refuses to come see his own kin for dinner. Having established\u2014and then some!\u2014that he despises Christmas, the man then refuses to return his nephew\u2019s \u201cHappy New Year.\u201d<\/p>\n
The big problem with being small<\/h3>\n
In all of these things and so many more, Ebenezer Scrooge was petty. I was going to write \u201cunbelievably petty,\u201d but if you strip away some of Dickens\u2019s cartoonish exaggeration (\u201cEven the blind men\u2019s dogs\u201d avoided him), it's not so unbelievable. Such pettiness is on full display today. Just scroll down your social media feed, and be sure to include your own posts and comments and Twitterpations in that inventory.<\/p>\n
If we belittle people for their station in life, like Scrooge does, we are being petty. If we plant ourselves on a molehill and make a mountain out of it, we are being petty. If we cut off contact with relatives over trifles or hoard abundant resources for no good reason or respond to others\u2019 genuine gestures of goodwill by mocking them, we are being petty. And this is not a harmless vice.<\/p>\n
One of Dickens\u2019s real insights into Scrooge, and by extension us, is that any benefit we derive from pettiness is terribly short lived. By being so small toward others, we diminish ourselves in numerous ways. It crimps our personalities and our vision. Scrooge is proud and miserable and terribly shortsighted. He has his money and his pride and a razor tongue\u2014and that\u2019s about it. With the exception of his nephew, most of the living have given up on seeing him as anything other than something like a ravenous loan shark.<\/p>\n\t\t