"Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grind-stone, Scrooge! A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old feature, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, this thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog days; and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas."
- A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Through massive amounts of degrading comments, Charles Dickens condescends the likes of the character Scrooge. Furthermore, the comments that had been written consists of dark, negative adjectives attempting to describe Scrooge. However, each adjective pertains to the likes of being synonymous to one and the other. The author simply doesn't attempt to spell out the character's name but replace it with, "old sinner." Such attitudes then adds upon the dark tone because when the words are synonymous to the author's attitudes, the effects becomes greater and when the Dickens have the inability to claim the Scrooge's name, he condescends the likes of that character. Also since the setting itself pertains to a mood of dark, cold days, it only furthers the overall effect of the mood. For the descriptions it had been within long sentences separated by apostrophes by which it adds little significance to the sentence itself but adds more condescending descriptions to the character.