Scrooge sees himself as a boy, passing the time alone by reading-and so we discover that Scrooge was not entirely alone, at least not in his imagination. He seems to see, physically, the colorful characters he encountered in literature; for example, Ali Baba (of The Arabian Nights, one of Dickens' own favorite books and one he connected with Christmas [Hearn 58]), and Robinson Crusoe and Friday (from the 1719 novel by Daniel Defoe which, by Dickens' day, had become a standard gift for boys at Christmas