Fezziwig

Old Fezziwig is a character in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. He is a seemingly prosperous London businessman to whom both the young Ebenezer Scrooge and Jacob Marley were apprenticed. A jovial and in most versions rotund fellow, he serves as an odd counterpoint to Scrooge. On the one hand, he embodies all the lessons about life Scrooge has lost and rejected. On the other hand, when Scrooge sees him in the vision provided by The Ghost of Christmas Past, he is clearly delighted and overjoyed, and in most versions makes it clear that his beloved former employer has passed on. In some versions, young Scrooge briefly bemoans the expense of the party, but quickly becomes just as eager to get to what even older Scrooge readily admits was a wondrous event. Unlike his time as a young boy, there is no misery or loneliness here, and he even has a best friend in Dick Wilkins, whom he says he was inseparable from. It is at one of Fezziwig's dances that he meets the love of his life, usually named Belle.

Fezziwig's physical description and demeanor again seems almost a point-by-point inversion of Scrooge's description as the story begins. Some versions add why and how Scrooge left his employ, but in most it is simply implied that this was after all an apprenticeship, and that Scrooge was expected to go his own way eventually. Even without acrimony between the two, it is shown how Scrooge in the name of greed ended up forgetting what he plainly saw as the best part of his life, and the reminder of the Ghost is a major step in his path to redemption.