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The Cratchit family is an impoverished hardworking and warmhearted family in A Christmas Carol (1843) by Charles Dickens.

The Cratchits are:

  • Bob Cratchit, Ebenezer Scrooge’s underpaid and overworked clerk
  • Bob Cratchit’s wife, identified only as Mrs. Cratchit in Dickens’s text
  • their son Tiny Tim, known for saying “God bless us, every one!”; he remains cheerful even though he is destined to die young if he does not receive medical treatment (which his parents cannot afford) for his illness
  • five other children: Martha, Belinda, Peter, and an unnamed girl and boy

Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol to make his readers aware of the living conditions of the working poor in England, and he presented the Cratchits as a sympathetic lower-class family living and working in London.

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The Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaThis article was most recently revised and updated by J.E. Luebering.