A Christmas Carol in the context of "Bob Cratchit"

A stock character is a dramatic or literary character representing a generic type in a conventional, simplified manner and recurring in many fictional works. The following list labels some of these stereotypes and provides examples. Some character archetypes, the more universal foundations of fictional characters, are also listed.

Some characters that were first introduced as fully fleshed-out characters become subsequently used as stock characters in other works — for example, the Ebenezer Scrooge character from A Christmas Carol, based upon whom the "miser" stereotype, whose name now has become a shorthand for this. Some stock characters incorporate more than one stock character; for example, a bard may also be a wisecracking jester.

A clerk is a white-collar worker who conducts record keeping as well as general office tasks, or a worker who performs similar sales-related tasks in a retail environment. The responsibilities of clerical workers commonly include record keeping, filing, staffing service counters, screening callers, and other administrative tasks. In City of London livery companies, the clerk is the chief executive officer.

Ebenezer Scrooge (/ˌɛ.bɪ.ˈniː.zər ˈskruːdʒ/) is a fictional character and the protagonist of Charles Dickens's 1843 novella A Christmas Carol. Initially a cold-hearted miser who despises Christmas, his redemption by visits from the ghost of Jacob Marley and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come has become a defining tale of the Christmas holiday in the English-speaking world.

Walter Robert Booth (12 July 1869 – 8 May 1938) was a British magician and early pioneer of British film. Collaborating with Robert W. Paul and then Charles Urban mostly on "trick" films, he pioneered techniques that led to what has been described as the first British animated film, The Hand of the Artist (1906). Booth is also notable for making the earliest film adaptation of A Christmas Carol with the silent film Scrooge, or, Marley's Ghost (1901).

It's a Wonderful Life is a 1946 American Christmas fantasy drama film directed and produced by Frank Capra. It is based on the short story and booklet "The Greatest Gift", self-published by Philip Van Doren Stern in 1943, which itself is loosely based on the 1843 Charles Dickens novella A Christmas Carol.

The film stars James Stewart as George Bailey, a man who has given up his personal dreams to help others in his community and whose thoughts of suicide on Christmas Eve bring about the intervention of his guardian angel, Clarence Odbody. Clarence shows George all the lives he touched and what the world would be like if he had not existed.

Mickey's Christmas Carol is a 1983 American animated Christmas fantasy featurette, directed and produced by Burny Mattinson. The cartoon is an adaptation of Charles Dickens's 1843 novella A Christmas Carol, and stars Scrooge McDuck as Ebenezer Scrooge. The rest of the cast was filled mostly using characters from pre-existing Disney animated properties; notably from the Mickey Mouse universe, Jiminy Cricket from Pinocchio (1940), The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949), and Robin Hood (1973).

The featurette was produced by Walt Disney Productions and released by Buena Vista Distribution on December 16, 1983, with the re-issue of The Rescuers (1977). In the United States, it was first aired on television on NBC, on December 10, 1984.

Jacob Marley is a fictional character in Charles Dickens's 1843 novella A Christmas Carol. Marley is the former business partner of Ebenezer Scrooge, the novella's protagonist; he is seven years deceased at the story's opening. On Christmas Eve, Scrooge is visited by Marley's ghost, who wanders the Earth entwined by heavy chains and money boxes due to a lifetime of greed and selfishness. Marley informs Scrooge that he has a single chance of redemption: he will be visited by three spirits in the hope that he will mend his ways. Otherwise, he will be cursed to carry chains of his own.