Ebenezer Scrooge is the main fictional character in A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. Developmentally, the novel is a rapid-action Bildungsroman in which Scrooge, an unreconstructed miser[?] and misanthrope[?], is visited by the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, who force him to see the error of his ways to the extent that by the end of the story he renounces his mean-spiritedness and becomes the epitome of warmth and human kindness.
... to that of Latin in Western Europe. It was (and still is) a language of religious ritual and scholarship, and it had locally varied spoken forms (Prakrits) such as Pali ...