1. What does the word "sinner” tells us about Scrooge at the start of the
novel?

Chicken

Explanation:

Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, 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.'

'Oh!' - this exclamation suggests that even the narrator is overwhelmed by how outrageously unpleasant Scrooge is. The exclamation mark draws our attention to the description that follows.

'a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!' - the list of adjectives emphasise how awful he is. Notice how each adjective is also connected with the hands. We see how he holds tightly to everything he has.

'solitary as an oyster' - oyster shells are calcified, hard and irregular in shape. This simile suggests that Scrooge also has these tough and strange qualities and that he is hard to 'open'.