Notes

Form:
A Christmas Carol is a novel.
Dickens has called each section a stave instead of a chapter.
A stave is the five lines that music is written on.
This is Dickens way of playing with the novella form and reminding us that this is a Christmas story, rather like the carols sung at Christmas time.
It contains a message of new life and possibilities.
He wrote this story to be read aloud, much as the carols are sung aloud.

Structure:
A Christmas Carol is a novella, differing from a novel in that there is only one reversal rather than several.
The scene is set out and characters are established very quickly.
It is made clear to us that Marley is indeed dead and the excessive focus on him makes us realise that he will be significant.
This becomes true when he become the inciting incident that sets the story to motion.
The text then follow the standard structure for a novella with each ghost creating rising action.
Scrooge's repentance adds to this but he faces a reversal when he will not look at the fave of the dead man in the bed.
This leads to the climax where his gravestone is revealed; the moment of highest impact and tension and the one that creates the permanent change in Scrooge due to his epiphany.
Stave five then follows the path of falling action as we see how Scrooge has in fact changed, leading to the resolution where Tiny Tim has not died.