SOURCE: “Dickens's A Christmas Carol,” in The Explicator, Vol. 50, No. 4, Summer, 1992, pp. 211–12.

In the following essay, Burleson compares the characters of Scrooge and his nephew, Fred.

It would seem that there could be no clearer or more unambiguously delineated an opposition than that which occurs in Dickens's A Christmas Carol when Scrooge's nephew comes to invite his uncle to Christmas dinner. The nephew delivers his oft-quoted encomium of Christmas as “a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time,” and Scrooge makes his own distaste for the Yuletide season abundantly plain. The opposition is one universally familiar: the Christmas-loving nephew's outgoing good-heartedness versus Scrooge's Christmas-hating miserliness and meanness of spirit. However, this supposedly stable bipolarity is one that the text itself subtly deconstructs in such a way as not merely to make problematic the logic of the opposition, but to deepen, as well, the textual significance of the...