A Christmas Carol

• "He has the power to make us happy or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome" - Scrooge
• "If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population" - Scrooge
• "Another idol has displaced me" - Belle
• "A solitary child, neglected by his friends, is left there still"
• "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." - Bob
• "I wear the chains I forged in life" - Marley's ghost
• "the fog and darkness thickened so"
• "I am as light as a feather" - Scrooge
• "Mankind was my business!" - Marley's ghost
• Infant mortality rate is 40%, makes Scrooge death of family relatable
• Divided into five staves. Staves and the title help to link the theme of Christmas by reflecting the traditional form of a carol and that its message is meant to be listened to. Christian values.
• Allegorical tale of redemption
• Follows conventions of a typical ghost story which was traditionally designed to bring about a crisis in which a character is confronted by spirits from the dead
• Cyclical structure within the novella
• Originally Scrooge is presented as a misanthropic businessman, who is miserly, callous and unsympathetic.
• At the end, Scrooge is a philanthropist: "I am not the man I was"
• The element of time introduced in several motifs
• Not chronological, adding to element of confusion Scrooge experiences.
• Dickens heightens confusion by refering to tolling of the bell, even though all 3 spirits appear in 1 night
• Dramatic tension created through use of time as Scrooge and the reader are repeatedly reminded that the spirits have a limited time to convey their message
• "My time grows short... Quick!" - Ghost of Christmas Past
• "My life upon this globe, is very brief" - Ghost of Christmas Present
• "The night is waning fast, and it is precious time to me, I know” - Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come
• Continual references to time allude to purgatory state that waits Scrooge if he doesn't change
• First person narrative creates authorial voice.
• Third person presents inner thoughts of Scrooge so we can sympathise with him
• tone of the narrator is conversational and humorous which puts the reader at ease and creates an element of trust
• significant amount of dialogue in order to add an element of realism to the characters and settings
• The short novella form means the story can be read aloud in a short space of time, making it the ideal Christmas entertainment
• The book was 5 shillings, 1/3 of a salary
• Didactic text - teaching morals
• Malthusian economics - finite resources for population growth, poor should be stopped proliferating
• "Are there no prisons?"
• Relative to other books, the novella was expensive, so aimed at those with domestic servants.
• Bob's wages were 15 shillings
• Bakers shut on Sunday, "deprive them of their means of dining"
• The British public responded warmly to the exuberance of his comic creativity, the magnanimity of his moral advocacy and vivid rendering of that period's problems.
• So influential, people wrote to the author in hopes of influencing the plot
• Walter Bagehot termed his politics "sentimental radicalism."
• In the USA a factory owner was so moved that he closed the factory on Christmas Day and sent every employee a turkey.