Among “respectable” classes (Fred and his wife would be considered respectable, even if they don’t have a lot of money), public displays of affection between married couples were very limited. They might walk with linked arms, touch each other briefly to get one another’s attention, and occasionally give pecks on the cheek. Hand holding and public kissing on the lips were frowned upon, and even long hugs were reserved for private settings or for particularly emotional occasions. Married people of the lower classes were less restrained about public affection, but even those couples would be unlikely to make smoochy spectacles of themselves. Whatever the class, though, anything was fair game behind closed doors.

In Dickens’s novella, after one of the Cratchit children recites Mark 9.36, the text continues: “Where had Scrooge heard those words? He had not dreamed them. The boy must have read them out, as he and the Spirit crossed the threshold. Why did he not go on?” Victorians reading A Christmas Carol would have known their bible verses, and they would know that the next verse, the one that Scrooge is wondering about, says, “Whosoever shall receive one of such children in my name, receiveth me.” These two verses together describe a process of transformation, of opening up one’s heart, and the fact that there’s a child at the center of these verses recalls to us all the encounters with children that contribute to Scrooge’s redemption: the child who sings a carol through his keyhole, his own childhood self, his sister as a child, Ignorance and Want, and, of course, Tiny Tim. While these verses would have made regular appearances in sermons during the 19th century and would be familiar Christian invocations of divine humility, the verse’s focus on children matters more here than its religious/Jesus significance. 

Although Dickens describes both Scrooge’s workplace and Fezziwig’s workplace using the word “warehouse,” Fezziwig’s instruction to “clear away” all the “movables” in his warehouse to make room for dancing makes it apparent that Fezziwig’s warehouse actually stores things, unlike Scrooge’s. The common understanding of Fezziwig is that he’s some kind of merchant, dealing in actual material goods, whereas Scrooge deals entirely in capital (money lending, debt servicing, buying/selling on the exchange). The contrast between these two forms of business matters: Fezziwig represents an older, more grounded, more communal kind of businessman, one whose interest lies in procuring concrete goods for people who need them, while Scrooge’s business focuses entirely on the ways that moving money around can make him more money. 

The narrator of the novella just says, “Scrooge and he were partners for I don’t know how many years.” The phrasing suggests that the narrator can’t remember a time when they weren’t partners, but also hints that he doesn’t really care how long they were partners. 

This expression originated in the 14th century, when nails were made by hand and were therefore fairly valuable. The phrase most likely refers to fact that handmade nails couldn’t be repurposed once they had been used to put doors together. When the nails were used for other construction purposes, they could often be removed and reused, but the way that nails had to be bent in order to hold the planks of a door together meant that they could never be used for anything else. So a “doornail” was a dead nail, no longer in circulation and not useful for any other kind of construction.

In the 19th century (and sometimes still), the chief mourner was the person who made funeral arrangements, guided the grieving process, and took on the primary logistical and emotional responsibilities for dealing with the deceased and their family members. Usually, the person who took on this role would have been a close family member of the deceased, whose age and capacities allowed them to handle all the messy complexity of a family death. It's a little bit unclear in the first lines of the text whether Scrooge is Marley’s chief mourner, or signs the register along with the chief mourner. If the latter is the case, the chief mourner would have been someone in the undertaker’s or parish’s employ, paid to serve in the capacity of chief mourner when the deceased has no family, close friends, or connections who can do it.  A few lines later Scrooge is described as Marley’s “sole mourner,” not his “chief mourner,” which suggests that Scrooge might have been unwilling to take on this important role, even for his longtime business partner. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkMbc0GghdU

Manufactured and artisan-produced toys in the 19th century were very expensive, and even children from wealthy Victorian families would have had very few of them.  If children from families like the Cratchit family had any toys at all, they would have been few and handmade from scraps and odds and ends that children and parents could spare: dolls made from leftover bits of fabric, a jumping rope that was a rope too worn for other uses, a spinning top carved from a spare piece of wood. For wealthy children, the prize nursery toy was an elaborately carved rocking horse; for less wealthy children, the hobby horse (a stick with a carved horse's head on top) was a substitute, while for children from poor families a plain stick and an imagination would have had to suffice. Games, more than toys, would have been the primary means of entertaining children: chasing games that required no equipment, made up theatricals, and, if children could get a few marbles or a hoop and a stick, those were also popular games.