A Christmas Carol
Summary
Ebenezer Scrooge is a miserly, cold-hearted, greedy businessman who thinks only of making money. He rejects a Christmas dinner invitation from his jolly nephew, Fred; he yells at charity workers; and he overworks his employee, Bob Cratchit. At night, Scrooge's former partner, Jacob Marley, has been dead for seven years, visits him in a form of a ghost. He has come to tell Scrooge that he is to be visited by three spirits over the next three days.
Christmas Past shows some of the main events in Scrooge's life to date, including his unhappy childhood, his happy apprenticeship to Mr. Fezziwig who cared for his employees, and the end of his engagement to a pretty young woman due to growing love of money. Scrooge shows newfound emotion when revisiting these scenes, often crying from identification with his former neglected self. The Ghost of Christmas Present shows him several current scenes of Christmas joy and charity, Bob Cratchit, celebrate Christmas with those they love, also how joyously are Fred and his clerk having a lot of fun in the room. Finally, a ragged boy and girl crawl out from the Ghost's robes. The Ghost calls them Ignorance and Want and warns Scrooge to beware of Ignorance.
In the final night, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shows him what he will leave behind when he is gone. He expresses the hope that these scenes of the future can be changed, and vows to incorporate the lessons of the past, present, and the future into his adoption of the Christmas spirits. Scrooge awakens on Christmas morning, a new man intent on doing good and celebrating the season with all those around him.
Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffman Dickens was born in Portsmouth, England on 7th February 1812, to Elizabeth Barrow and John Dickens. Charles was the second born of eight children. When Charles was 10, his family was facing huge financial difficulties, they decided to move to London all the way from Kent. In the year 1824, due to family poverty, Charles was sent to label bottles in Warren's blacking factory. During the same period, John Dickens was imprisoned for debt in Marshalsea prison.
The rest of the family moved to live near the prison, leaving Charles to live alone. This experience of lonely hardship was the most significant event of his life. It colored his view of the world and would later be described in a number of his novels.
In the age of fifteen, Charles was again forced to leave school and work as a parliament journalist and the clerk of an attorney. By 1832 he had become a reporter for two London newspaper and in the following year, he began to contribute a series of impressions and sketches to other newspapers and magazines, signing some of them "Boz" as his pseudonym. These scenes of London life went far to establish his reputation and were published in 1836 as Sketches by Boz, his first book. On the strength of this success, he married Catherine Hogarth, daughter of Evening Chronicle editor, George Hogarth. Together they had ten children.
His early works
In the year 1836, Charles also began to publish The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club in 20 monthly installments. Pickwick became one of the most popular works of the time and continued to be so after it was published in book form in 1837.
Charles began publishing his new novel, Oliver Twist, his first novel, follows the fortunes of an innocent orphan through the London streets. The book was inspired by how Charles felt as an impoverished child forced to get by on his wits and earn his own keep. He was now editor of Bentley's Miscellany, a new monthly magazine. He continued publishing his novel in his later magazines, Household Worlds and All the Year Round.
Though Charles's career was successful, for the next decade, his books did not achieve the standard of his early success. These works include Nicholas Nickleby(1838), The Old Curiosity Shop (1840), and Barnaby Rudge (1841).
In 1842, Charles was as popular in America as he was in England, he and his wife, Catherine went on a five-month lecture tour of the United States, speaking out strongly against slavery and in support of other reforms. On his return, he wrote American Notes, a book that criticizes American life as being culturally backward and materialistic. His next novel, The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (1843), describes a man's struggle to survive on the ruthless American frontier.
During the year in which Chuzzlewit appeared, Charles also published a Christmas story, A Christmas Carol. The book features the timeless protagonist Ebenezer Scrooge, a curmudgeonly old miser who with the help of some ghosts, find the Christmas spirit. Charles penned the book in just six weeks, beginning in October and finishing just in time for the holiday celebrations. This book was a success, selling more than 6,000 copies upon publication. Readers in England and America were touched by the book's empathetic emotion depth. Despite literary critiques, the book remains one of the Dickens' most well-known and beloved works.
Information from here & here & here
The real reason Charles Dickens wrote
A Christmas Carol
A Christmas Carol was intended as a social criticism, to bring attention to the hardships faced by England's lower classes. As from the researches above, I've noticed that Charles Dickens often writes what he experienced and seen in the society to his paper.
In 1843, Dickens was horrified by reading a Government report - The Parliamentary Commission on the Employment of Women and Children, showing the horrific conditions under which very young children were made to work underground or to work tremendously long hours in appalling conditions in factories. Dickens read this and described himself as being "perfectly strike down by it" and he determined that he would strike, as he said, "the heaviest blow in my power" on behalf of these victims of the Industrial Revolution and in October 1843, he was giving a talk in Manchester. It was in the course of giving this talk in this large industrial city, that the idea came to him that the best thing he could do by way of calling public attention to the horror of this report, would be by writing a story, rather than an article - as he said, "something that would come down with sledgehammer force" - and this was the conception of the Christmas Carol, beginning, with the conception of Scrooge - that wonderful name, Scrooge - a combination of screw and gouge.
Dickens hopes to illustrate how self-serving, insensitive people can be converted into charitable, caring, and socially conscious members of society through the intercession of moralizing quasi-religious lessons. He was involved in charities and social issues throughout his entire life. At the time that he wrote A Christmas Carol he was very concerned with impoverished children who turned to crime and delinquency in order to survive. He thought that education could provide a way to a better life for these children. The schools provided free education for children in the inner-city. The movement got its name from the way the children attending the school were dressed. They often wore tattered or ragged clothing.
Dickens is also concerned to make his story the vehicle of Christian truths. The theme of A Christmas Carol is not simply Christmas feasting; it is a story of conversion, of release from the imprisoning chains of grasping covetousness worn by Marley's Ghost into the freedom of compassion and generosity, the smog-filled streets of the town in which Scrooge sees the ghosts of avaricious, selfish and grasping contemporaries.
Information from here & here & here
