Once upon a time—of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve—old Scrooge sat busy in his counting-house. It was cold, bleak, biting weather: foggy withal: and he could hear the people in the court outside, go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their breasts, and stamping their feet upon the pavement stones to warm them.

Background.

Context.

Literary Technique.

Dickens uses the words ‘Once upon a time‘ in this quotation to introduce the setting of Scrooge in his counting-house on a cold Christmas Eve. Once upon a time is traditionally used to start a fairy tale, a short story often read aloud to entertain families or small groups of people in a time long before the electronic entertainment we enjoy today. A Christmas Carol was written as a short novella, a shorter form of a novel, and like fairy tales designed to be easily read aloud in a short space of time, making it an ideal entertainment at Christmas time. Fairy Tales traditionally have happy endings so by starting the novel this way, Dickens is suggesting to the reader that the story is likely to have a happy ending.

Source.

Taken from the following passage of Stave 1 (Marley’s Ghost) of A Christmas Carol:

Once upon a time—of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve—old Scrooge sat busy in his counting-house. It was cold, bleak, biting weather: foggy withal: and he could hear the people in the court outside, go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their breasts, and stamping their feet upon the pavement stones to warm them. The city clocks had only just gone three, but it was quite dark already—it had not been light all day—and candles were flaring in the windows of the neighbouring offices, like ruddy smears upon the palpable brown air. The fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was so dense without, that although the court was of the narrowest, the houses opposite were mere phantoms. To see the dingy cloud come drooping down, obscuring everything, one might have thought that Nature lived hard by, and was brewing on a large scale.

The door of Scrooge’s counting-house was open that he might keep his eye upon his clerk, who in a dismal little cell beyond, a sort of tank, was copying letters. Scrooge had a very small fire, but the clerk’s fire was so very much smaller that it looked like one coal. But he couldn’t replenish it, for Scrooge kept the coal-box in his own room; and so surely as the clerk came in with the shovel, the master predicted that it would be necessary for them to part. Wherefore the clerk put on his white comforter, and tried to warm himself at the candle; in which effort, not being a man of a strong imagination, he failed.

Characters.