What’s the Matter with Ebenezer Scrooge?

Skip to main content Skip to footer What’s the Matter with Ebenezer Scrooge? On keeping yourself. Benjamin Myers December 23, 2025 I am trying to write an essay about A Christmas Carol , but students and colleagues keep interrupting. They pop in to ask about classes, committee work, last night’s Thunder game. I don’t have time to talk. I’m trying to write about what is wrong with Ebenezer Scrooge, but instead I am just getting grumpy. Of course, everybody knows what’s wrong with Scrooge. It’s greed, right? Even if you haven’t read the book, you’ve seen the cartoon duck swimming in a giant vat of gold coins. We all agree that greed is Scrooge’s problem. The primary object of that greed, however, is not money. What Ebenezer Scrooge is greedy with is himself. Just as I finish the paragraph above, a student comes into my office to ask about some sources for a paper on medieval allegory. Why didn’t I close the office door? I don’t say that, of course. I get up from my desk and pull C.S. Lewis’s The Allegory of Love and Umberto Echo’s Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages from the shelf. I chat with her about Dante and her thesis. I try to remember that I am glad this student is interested in the Divine Comedy , that this is what I am here to do: light fires of interest in the beautiful and permanent things. Part of me, however, just wants to get back to writing. Part of me is greedy. I’m a little Scrooge at times. Maybe most people are. We want to keep ourselves for ourselves. I hate to admit that, because this is how Dickens describes his famous miser: Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which not steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days, and didn’t thaw in one degree at Christmas. Scrooge is covetous, sure, but he is also “self-contained” and “solitary.” Solitude is not a bad thing, necessarily. Sometimes I just need to close the office door and get in some reading or writing. We need time for contemplation, for reading, for prayer. To be as “solitary as an oyster,” however, would suggest that there is a point at which our isolation starts to eat away at our humanity. In the Politics , Aristotle famously asserts that a man who cannot live among other men must be either something more than a man or...

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