“A merry Christmas, Bob!” said Scrooge, with an earnestness that could not be mistaken, as he clapped him on the back. “A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you, for many a year! I’ll raise your salary, and endeavour to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop, Bob! Make up the fires, and buy another coal-scuttle before you dot another i, Bob Cratchit!”
The final act of Scrooge’s reclamation is to repair his relationship with Bob Cratchit. He waits for Cratchit, arriving at his office early the next day, and ambushes the clerk when he arrives late. But it’s all farce, as Scrooge offers Cratchit a raise and offers to help him with Tiny Tim as well.
Even today, there are defenders of Scrooge’s pre-reclamation ways who cry “Ba! Humbug!” at Scrooge’s change of heart.
Yaron Brook, president and executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, defended Scrooge’s miserly treatment of his beleaguered clerk. Brook said Cratchit was getting paid the market wage and that his boss had no moral obligation to help him out.
“I assume if somebody else was willing to pay him more, that he would move jobs and no one would feel sorry for Scrooge if [Cratchit] just walked up and left because he got more money somewhere else,” Brook said. “If he’s making very little, it’s probably because he adds very little productive value to the economy, to business. That’s the reality of the market place and there’s nothing unjust about that.” To their insistence, those who still champion the unredeemed Scrooge point out that Cratchit was paid fifteen shillings a week, about average for a clerk and double what a general laborer earned.
In fact, Scrooge’s decision at the end of the story to boost Cratchit’s salary would be a “disastrous course of action in real life,” Brook said, adding that Scrooge’s clients would suffer because he has less money to reinvest into lending them money.
Jim Lacey, author and analyst at the Institute for Defense Analyses, bemoaned Scrooge’s turn to altruism, saying it was unfortunate for the “many thousands whose jobs Scrooge’s investments had underwritten” as his “transfer of funds to less productive causes undoubtedly cost them dearly.”
Still, the working class understood the heroism it took for Scrooge to help out a fellow human being who was absolutely in need. And deep in the recesses of his mind, hadn’t he wished as a child that someone would have done the same for his father? This must have been a deep-seated issue in the mind of the author, a reworking of his life into a fairytale ending.