Timothy Cratchit, called "Tiny Tim", is a fictional character from the 1843 novella A Christmas Carol

A Christmas Carol

A Christmas Carol is a novella by English author Charles Dickens first published by Chapman & Hall on 17 December 1843. The story tells of sour and stingy Ebenezer Scrooge's ideological, ethical, and emotional transformation after the supernatural visits of Jacob Marley and the Ghosts of...

by Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens

Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity and fame than had any previous author during his lifetime, and he remains popular, having been responsible for some of English literature's most iconic...

. He is a minor character, the young son of Bob Cratchit

Bob Cratchit

Robert "Bob" Cratchit is a fictional character who is the abused, underpaid clerk of Ebenezer Scrooge in the Charles Dickens story A Christmas Carol...

, and is seen only briefly, but serves as an important symbol of the consequences of the protagonist's choices. It is claimed that the character is based on the invalid son of a friend of Dickens who owned a cotton mill in Ardwick

Ardwick

Ardwick is a district of the City of Manchester, in North West England, about one mile east of Manchester City Centre.By the mid-19th century Ardwick had grown from being a village into a pleasant and wealthy suburb of Manchester, but by the end of that century it had become heavily industrialised...

, Manchester

Manchester

Manchester is a city and metropolitan borough in Greater Manchester, England. According to the Office for National Statistics, the 2010 mid-year population estimate for Manchester was 498,800. Manchester lies within one of the UK's largest metropolitan areas, the metropolitan county of Greater...

.

When Scrooge

Ebenezer Scrooge

Ebenezer Scrooge is the principal character in Charles Dickens's 1843 novel, A Christmas Carol. At the beginning of the novel, Scrooge is a cold-hearted, tight-fisted and greedy man, who despises Christmas and all things which give people happiness...

 is visited by The Ghost of Christmas Present

Ghost of Christmas Present

The Ghost of Christmas Present is a character in one of the best-known works of the English novelist Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol. The Spirit closely resembles Father Christmas from local folklore....

 he is shown just how ill Tim really is, and that Tim will die unless he receives treatment (which the family cannot afford due to Scrooge's miserliness).