ABSTRACT
The cold and callous heart of Ebenezer Scrooge is proverbial. Less familiar to today's reading public is the way Charles Dickens portrays his greedy and heartless banker as “melancholic.” Yet, by identifying the loss and sadness Scrooge suffers and parading it before him via four spectral visits, Dickens takes up a long-standing tradition that associates wealth and greed with Saturn and melancholy. This chapter reads Dickens' A Christmas Carol as a re-description of the melancholy homo economicus. It aims to understand better how the popular author adapted this (medieval and early modern) literary-mythological topic to the exigencies of mid-nineteenth-century capitalism. The most salient feature of the portrait of Scrooge is the metaphor of “cold,” which accompanies him throughout his journeys. In addition to analysing the multiple valences of “cold melancholy,” the chapter argues that Dickens employs the bipolar structure and the specific temporality of melancholy, which alternates between depression and mania, sadness and giddiness, to give the Carol an ironic twist. Scrooge's giddy generosity emerges as both a sign of conversion and as a seasonal state of exception, which serves a bourgeoning consumer capitalism from which future “Scrooges” can only stand to profit.
