Tiny Tim is the young, ailing son of Bob Cratchit, Ebenezer Scrooge’s underpaid clerk.

He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.

[1] Dickens also had a sister, Fanny, who had a disabled son named Henry Augustus Burnett (1839–1849) who may have been an inspiration for Tiny Tim.

[5] Dickens never explicitly specifies the illness Tiny Tim suffers, although he walks with a crutch and has "his limbs supported by an iron frame".

[6] A 1997 editorial in The Journal of Infectious Diseases presented a fictional account of construction workers in London discovering Tiny Tim's grave to speculate on the possible causes of his ailment.