ISOLATION
Scrooge is described as living alone in a gloomy suite of rooms, with the other rooms let out as offices. The text emphasizes his solitary existence and the dreariness of his environment, suggesting a claim of personal isolation.
SCROOGE
He lived in chambers which had once belonged to his deceased partner. They were a gloomy suite of rooms, in a lowering pile of building up a yard, where it had so little business to be, that one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was a young house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses, and have forgotten the way out again. It was old enough now, and dreary enough; for nobody lived in it but Scrooge, the other rooms being all let out as offices.