a christmas carol

• Scrooge

  A miser who gives up on love and family in order to hoard wealth
• The decembers of 1842 and 1843 were two of the mildest ever recorded, but the snow and frost of A Christmas Carol is thought to refer back to the really harsh winters of 1837 to 1841 or even the coldest period in living memory which was 1810 to 1819
• The extreme cold is a perfect metaphor for Scrooge's cold heart and miserliness
• Dickens didn't have Scrooge wake up to melting snow on Christmas morning as a metaphor for the thawing of his cold heart, as this would confuse the brand of Christmas which he was inventing
• Dickens had already published several Christmas-themed writing and had commercial success making the reading public associate the story of Christmas with his story
• Dickens branded A Christmas Carol with snow and the giant feast of a turkey, even though turkeys were not a Christmas dish in particular in Dickens' time
• Dickens virtually invented the tradition of turkeys as a Christmas dish single-handedly in order to make readers return to this book every Christmas
• Dickens taps into existing traditions instead of this just being a morality tale in which good triumphs over evil
• The ghosts of Christmas Past and Christmas Present make very few references to Jesus or the church, suggesting that light and feasting are not just symbols of Christianity but are symbolic of man's generosity to their fellow man especially in winter
• Dickens also taps into the winter tradition of sharing ghost stories, with Stave One filled with ghosts of businessmen, most notably Marley
• The final Stave begins with the phantom whose description makes him sound like the figure of Death
• Storytelling was a fundamental human experience in Dickens' day, with people commonly telling and reading stories around the fireplace
• Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol with performance in mind, as it was common for mothers and fathers to read it out loud to their families
• Dickens performed this novel on stage more than any other, which is why the ghosts are so important to the spirit of the story
• Dickens was hurt by the American newspapers and other American writers accusing him of being money-grabbing
• Dickens had spent part of his own childhood working in appalling conditions because of his family's poverty, and it astonished him that a Christian society could ignore the condition and needs of the poor
• Dickens wanted to change the world here and now, as he felt that the Christian belief in salvation in heaven allowed the government to ignore or mistreat the poor
• Dickens priced A Christmas Carol at five shillings, making it very expensive for the time, even though he was desperate for money
• Dickens insisted on really high-quality printing and color illustrations, even though this left him with very little profit, because he most wanted to teach each well-off reader a lesson
• Dickens included charitable giving in the novel's circular structure, as he knew that charity on its own was just like putting dressing on a wound, and that the real problem was businesses not paying a decent wage
• Dickens created the character of Fezziwig to show that bosses who embrace life and share their fortune and happiness are the ones who give others pleasure - he is scrooges anthesis
• Dickens wanted to make the point that Fezziwig's good example has the power to change even the coldest heart like Scrooge's
• Dickens was furious about the 1844 Factories Act, which only decided to make children's lives much better by allowing them to work six days a week instead of seven and only nine hours a day
• Dickens interrupted writing a pamphlet about the 1844 Factories Act in order to write A Christmas Carol, which was an appeal to the people of England on behalf of the poor man's child
• Dickens' book is part of a political movement which only just over a year later in 1845 resulted in Marx and Engels writing The Condition of the Working Class in England, which led to the principles of socialism and communism
• Dickens dramatized this political message through the Ghost of Christmas Present, inventing the extraordinary scene where Scrooge is shown the vision of the two terrible, starving-looking children hidden inside the ghost's robes, called Ignorance and Want
• Dickens was furious about the poor conditions and wrote a pamphlet about it, but interrupted it to write a Christmas Carol
• Dickens took the political message and created the character of Tiny Tim
• Without Tiny Tim


  The ghosts would not have persuaded Scrooge to change
• Dickens wanted to change the future for every child
• Dickens' book is part of a political movement which led to the principles of socialism and communism
• Dickens dramatized the political message through the Ghost of Christmas Present
• The Ghost of Christmas Present

  • Showed Scrooge a vision of reality in two terrible starving looking children hidden inside the ghost's robes, a boy called Ignorance and a girl called Want
• The boy Ignorance and girl Want are totally irrelevant to Scrooge's journey, but exist to show that education is the solution to mankind's problem
• The warning about the boy Ignorance sounds like a warning about revolution, but unlike Marx and Engels, Dickens wanted to avoid revolution
• The massive increase in British literacy was partly responsible for the British finding a political and social voice and avoiding the need for violence and revolution
• Dickens believed the world could be made better through education and literacy, allowing the worker to make their own lives better
• The poor at the time were seen as deserving their poverty, due to the ideas of economist Reverend Thomas Malthus
• Malthus argued that population growth was exponential while food production was arithmetical, leading to the poor starving and dying young
• Dickens gives Malthus' ideas to Scrooge, who argues that the only way to save society is to let the surplus poor population die - and the poor and ooor because they’re lazy