God bless us, every one
Tiny Tim, and the trap Dickens avoided
Tiny Tim has four lines in the entire novella. Four. The character who has become shorthand for Victorian sentimentality is barely on the page.
And the famous one is not even said at the moment you remember. It closes the book, reported secondhand, after everything has already changed.
What Dickens actually does with him
The trap with a sick child in a Christmas story is obvious, and Dickens walks right up to it. What keeps it from collapsing is that Tim is never the one asking for anything.
The famous scene is not Tim being pitiful. It is Bob reporting what Tim said at church — that he hoped the congregation saw him, because it might be pleasant for them to remember, on Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk.
A child framing his own visible illness as potentially useful to other people is a much stranger and sharper thing than a child asking to be saved. It is also the only moment in the book where someone is generous without having anything.
The line that actually does the work
It is not Tim's. It is Scrooge's, and it is a question:
"Tell me if Tiny Tim will live."
Everything before that is Scrooge being shown things. This is the first time he wants something for someone else, and the Ghost answers him with his own words about surplus population — which is the cruellest and best move in the book.
On the pudding
Worth saying, because it gets lost: the Cratchit Christmas dinner is tiny. A goose that would not feed six, a pudding "like a speckled cannon-ball." Dickens spends a full page on how small it is and how completely nobody minds.
That is the argument of the whole book, made with food rather than ghosts. And it is why Scrooge's earlier threat — that carol singers should be boiled with their own pudding — lands differently on a reread.
The quieter lines, for people who finished the book:
Questions people ask
How many lines does Tiny Tim have?
Four. The character who became shorthand for Victorian sentimentality is barely on the page, and his famous line closes the book secondhand.
Is A Christmas Carol sentimental?
Less than its reputation. Tim never asks to be saved, and the Cratchit dinner is described as small rather than magical. The warmth comes from people not minding, not from abundance.
What does 'boiled with his own pudding' mean?
Scrooge's threat about carol singers early in the book — that anyone going about with Merry Christmas on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding. It reads very differently after the Cratchit dinner.