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.
... he was ordained on May 24, 1864. On May 10, 1873, at his request, he was permitted to travel to Molokai to help the lepers who had virtually nothing to keep them warm ...