A Christmas Carol
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99 free A Christmas Carol trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
50 free A Christmas Carol trivia questions with answers. From Ebenezer Scrooge's transformation to Tiny Tim's iconic blessing, A Christmas Carol has shaped how the world celebrates Christmas since 1843. This quiz covers the original novella, its unforgettable characters, landmark film adaptations from Alastair Sim to the Muppets, Dickens' social activism, and the cultural legacy of the most famous Christmas story ever written.
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Q 01What is the name of Scrooge's deceased business partner in A Christmas Carol?
Jacob Marley
Jacob Marley, Scrooge's late partner, returns as a ghost on Christmas Eve to warn him that three spirits will visit, offering him a chance to escape Marley's fate.
Q 02By calling Christmas 'humbug', what is Scrooge saying the holiday is?
A fraud
A fraud: 'humbug' began as eighteenth-century student slang for a hoax or deception, so Scrooge is dismissing the whole season as a sham; he first snaps it when his nephew bursts in full of good cheer.
Q 03In A Christmas Carol, which spirit tells Scrooge it has had more than eighteen hundred brothers?
Christmas Present
The Ghost of Christmas Present says so, and Scrooge mutters, 'A tremendous family to provide for!'; the spirit's life is brief, and Scrooge sees its hair turn grey before it vanishes at midnight.
Q 04Bob Cratchit's fifteen 'Bob' a week in A Christmas Carol puns on slang for which coin?
Shilling
Shilling: the coin was known as a bob, so Dickens jokes that the clerk 'pocketed on Saturdays but fifteen copies of his Christian name'; on that he keeps a wife and six children in a four-roomed house.
Q 05Which line of Tiny Tim's closes A Christmas Carol?
God bless us, every one!
'God bless us, every one!' is first heard at the Cratchits' Christmas dinner, where Tiny Tim, on a stool close to his father's side, is the last of the family to answer Bob's toast.
Q 06In A Christmas Carol, what does Scrooge at first blame for the sight of Marley's ghost in his room?
Indigestion
Indigestion: Scrooge tells the ghost it may be 'an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese', and puns that there is 'more of gravy than of grave' about it.
Q 07A Christmas Carol is usually classed as which kind of literary work?
Novella
Novella: where Dickens's novels first came out in instalments, the Carol was a fraction of their length and was published complete in a single small volume a few days before Christmas.
Q 08In A Christmas Carol, what is the name of Scrooge's cheerful nephew, who invites him to Christmas dinner every year?
Fred
Fred, the only child of Scrooge's late sister, keeps inviting his uncle to Christmas dinner despite constant rejection and toasts him anyway.
Q 09Sales of which Dickens novel were slumping, deepening his money troubles, when he began A Christmas Carol?
Martin Chuzzlewit
Martin Chuzzlewit sold so poorly that Chapman & Hall hinted at docking Dickens £50 a month; he began the Carol partly to make up the shortfall, and within a year he had left the firm for its printers.
Q 10What does Scrooge buy for the Cratchit family after his transformation?
A prize turkey
Scrooge sends the prize turkey, 'twice the size of Tiny Tim', anonymously by cab from the poulterer's; the Cratchits had been making do with a goose.
Q 11What is wrong with Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol?
He walks with a crutch
He walks with a crutch and wears an iron frame on his limbs; Dickens never names the illness, only that the boy will die unless the future changes.
Q 12What does Marley's ghost wear when he appears to Scrooge?
A long chain of cash-boxes
A long chain of cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers and steel purses winds round him like a tail; 'I wear the chain I forged in life,' he says, made 'link by link' and put on of his own free will.
Q 13A Christmas Carol appeared in 1843 under which British monarch?
Victoria
Q 21Which actor played Scrooge in the 1951 British film of A Christmas Carol?
Alastair Sim
Alastair Sim starred in the film known in Britain simply as Scrooge, and twenty years later voiced the miser again in Richard Williams's animated version, which won the Oscar for best animated short.
Q 22In The Muppet Christmas Carol, which Muppet plays Scrooge's humble clerk Bob Cratchit?
Kermit the Frog
Kermit the Frog plays Cratchit opposite Miss Piggy as his wife; it was the first Muppet film made after Jim Henson's death in 1990, so Steve Whitmire was performing Kermit in his place.
Q 23Who played Scrooge in The Muppet Christmas Carol?
Michael Caine
Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were making the Christmas tree fashionable in those same years, yet no Christmas tree appears anywhere in the Carol, which was published on 19 December 1843.
Q 14What are the chapters of A Christmas Carol called?
Staves
Staves: the musical term suits a story called a carol, and Dickens repeated the trick a year later in The Chimes, a tale of church bells whose four parts are called 'quarters'.
Q 15What does the Ghost of Christmas Present bring out from his clothing as midnight nears?
Two children, Ignorance and Want
Two children, Ignorance and Want, kneel at the spirit's feet; the Ghost tells Scrooge to beware them both, but the boy above all, for on his brow is written Doom.
Q 16After the three spirits' visits, a boy tells Scrooge it is which day?
Christmas Day
Christmas Day: Marley had set the visits for three successive nights, the first when 'the bell tolls One', yet Scrooge wakes to find that 'the Spirits have done it all in one night'.
Q 17What is the name of Scrooge's former employer who threw generous Christmas parties?
Mr. Fezziwig
Mr. Fezziwig clears his warehouse for a Christmas Eve ball, and when the Ghost calls it a small matter Scrooge defends him: 'The happiness he gives is quite as great as if it cost a fortune.'
Q 18What is the name of Scrooge's sister who is shown by the Ghost of Christmas Past?
Fan
Little Fan comes to fetch him home from boarding school for good, because their father has grown 'so much kinder'; she later died leaving one child, the nephew who keeps inviting Scrooge to dinner.
Q 19What is the name of the woman who was once engaged to Scrooge?
Belle
Belle releases Scrooge from the engagement, telling him a golden idol has displaced her; the Ghost then shows her years later as a happy wife and mother, laughing among her children.
Q 20What is Scrooge's first name?
Ebenezer
Ebenezer is a Hebrew name meaning 'stone of help', a memorial stone Samuel raised in the Bible; 'scrooge' has since become a common noun for a miser.
Michael Caine said he would play it 'like I'm working with the Royal Shakespeare Company'; David Hemmings, Ron Moody and George Carlin had been considered.
Q 24Which Muppet character serves as the narrator in The Muppet Christmas Carol?
Gonzo the Great
Gonzo the Great narrates as Charles Dickens himself, with Rizzo the Rat as his sidekick; director Brian Henson says they asked who was the least likely Muppet to play the author, and cast him.
Q 25In the 1988 film Scrooged, Bill Murray plays a modern-day Scrooge who works as what?
A TV network president
A TV network president: Murray's Frank Cross runs IBC and is staging a live Christmas Eve broadcast of the Dickens story when the ghosts arrive; Karen Allen plays his lost love Claire.
Q 26Which actor starred as Scrooge in the 1984 TV film of A Christmas Carol, shot in Shrewsbury?
George C. Scott
George C. Scott's Scrooge left a mark on the town: the gravestone carved with the miser's name for the churchyard scene stayed behind at St Chad's in Shrewsbury and became a visitor attraction.
Q 27What technology was used to create the 2009 Disney film A Christmas Carol starring Jim Carrey?
Motion capture
Motion capture: Robert Zemeckis had used the same performance-capture technique on The Polar Express and Beowulf, and here it lets Jim Carrey play not only Scrooge but all three Christmas ghosts.
Q 28Which actor toured a one-man stage version of A Christmas Carol, playing every part, before a 1999 TV film?
Patrick Stewart
Patrick Stewart developed the solo version because filming Star Trek left no time for a long stage run, and it reached Broadway in 1991.
Q 29Dickens worked out much of A Christmas Carol while doing what?
Walking at night
Walking at night: he covered fifteen or twenty miles through London's dark streets 'many and many a night' after sober folk had gone to bed, weeping and laughing over the story as it took shape.
Q 30What did Dickens set out to do for society by writing A Christmas Carol?
To protest child poverty
To protest child poverty: shaken by a visit to a ragged school for London's street children, Dickens conceived the story in October 1843, around a speech he gave in Manchester on educating the poor.