Great Books: A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

Few authors are as well know, and well read, as Charles Dickens.

When Dickens was twelve, his father, John, was imprisoned for debt, an event that Dickens considered the most terrible experience of his life. Removed from school and put to work in a blacking (shoe-dye) factory, he lived alone, ashamed and frightened, in a lodging house in North London. It is from this experience that most of Dickens’ novels arose.

The constellation of great Victorian novelists—Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope—were all, to some extent, committed writers and had a sense of grave responsibility for the welfare of their fellow human beings. Charles Dickens, in particular, took to heart the plight of his fellow Englishman. Oliver Twist, 1837-39 criticized the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834; Tale of Two Cities, 1859, the French Revolution. Bleak House, 1852-53, criticized the British judicial system. Hard Times, 1854, attacked British social policy in general. A Christmas Carol was written in that same vein.

Few protagonists change so completely and quickly as Ebenezer Scrooge does during one faithful Christmas Eve. After Scrooge’s dead business partner Marley visits, the ghosts of Christmas Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas Future guide Scrooge through his own reclamation project. Finally, the vision of his own headstone and the realization that no one will mourn his death force Scrooge to see the error of his miserable ways! The primary beneficiaries of Scrooge’s repentant rebirth are his poor clerk Bob Cratchit and his family, especially the crippled Tiny Tim. When Scrooge awakens from his nocturnal visitations, he delivers a huge turkey to the Cratchit household and gives Bob a substantial, and much deserved raise. He becomes a “second father” to Tim and reconciles with his own nephew, son of Scrooge’s beloved, deceased sister Fan.

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