CHARLES DICKENS By: G Higher Level Video on Charles Dickens.
Dickens reminds us of shared humanity and common duty to ...€¦ · together in a similar fashion....
Transcript of Dickens reminds us of shared humanity and common duty to ...€¦ · together in a similar fashion....
‘A Christmas Carol’
Dickens reminds us of shared humanity and
common duty to our fellow man.
‘A Christmas Carol’
Dickens suggests that we need to integrate emotionally and
psychologically. He shows that we need to illuminate our previous experiences before we can fully understand our present state.
‘A Christmas Carol’
When Scrooge sees the horrific vision of the tortured souls’ fate and the chance of avoiding the
same for himself, it sets the wheels of radical transformation
in motion.
‘A Christmas Carol’
Fear is one of the primary motivating factors for change.
‘A Christmas Carol’
Humility and shame can be seen as doorways to growth in the novella.
‘A Christmas Carol’
‘Carols’ are in sections called ‘staves’. A carol requires teamwork and
supporting each other – not a solo performance. Dickens’ intention of the
book seems to be to bring people together in a similar fashion.
‘A Christmas Carol’
True transformation starts with a profound
shift in perspective, and trauma is often a force
for change.
‘A Christmas Carol’
The agony of Marley and the other spirits at the end of Stave 1 is their incapacity to help others. They “squandered” the only chance they had to make something meaningful of their lives. There is a karmic suggestion that
hurtful, selfish and generally unskilful actions constantly forge our own metal chains.
‘A Christmas Carol’
Dickens himself had humble origins and only a partial
education, as a result of being sent to a blacking factory whilst
his parents were sent to a debtor’s prison.
‘A Christmas Carol’
Dickens was keen to escape the endemic attitudes of greed,
ignorance and hatred that he himself had been exposed to as a
child in the blacking factory.
‘A Christmas Carol’
Dickens shows an alternative humanitarian vision through Scrooge’s positive nephew,
Fred, and the wretched Marley’s lamentations.
‘A Christmas Carol’
Jacob Marley’s chains are of his own making. They are a type of divine retribution,
implying that everything is interconnected through time
and space.
‘A Christmas Carol’
Dickens suggests that yesterday shapes today and who we choose to be today defines who we will become tomorrow. Actions DO have consequences and it’s our responsibility to choose wisely.
‘A Christmas Carol’
Dickens was a skilful social
commentator.
‘A Christmas Carol’
The Victorians were far more religious than our modern readers. Dickens implies that the more materialistic readers are doomed to purgatory if
they fail to see the error of their ways and change.
‘A Christmas Carol’
Dickens believed in the ethical and political potential of
literature, and the novel in particular, and he treated his fiction as a springboard for
debates about moral and social reform.
‘A Christmas Carol’
Dickens showed compassion and empathy towards the vulnerable and disadvantaged segments of
English society, and contributed to several important social reforms.
‘A Christmas Carol’
• Church attendance was as high as 50%• Biblical Christianity was thickly
intertwined in the fabric of Victorian society.
‘A Christmas Carol’
The prevailing Victorian view was that the poor were responsible for their own situation,
that their only hope was to reform themselves. It was widely believed that the
poor were poor because they were sinful, and that the only way to help them is by saving their soul – by leading them to church and
prayer.
‘A Christmas Carol’
• There is only one God in three persons: while distinct from one another in their relations of origin ("it is the Father who generates, the Son who is begotten, and the Holy Spirit who proceeds") and in their relations with one another, they are stated to be one in all else, co-equal, and each is God, whole and entire".
• Accordingly, the whole work of creation and grace is seen as a single operation common to all three divine persons, in which each shows forth what is proper to him in the Trinity, so that all things are "from the Father", "through the Son" and "in the Holy Spirit".
• In order for Scrooge to reach enlightenment he must encounter and embrace God in all of his forms
Holy Trinity
‘A Christmas Carol’
- The novella is set in the 1840s and difficult period with:
Mass starvation in Ireland Fears of overpopulation Dangerous child labour Some child labour reforms in 1844 (9-13 year
olds 9hr shifts, 6 days a week)
‘A Christmas Carol’
William Booth, In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890)‘Darkest England may be described as consisting broadly of three
circles, one within the other. The outer and widest circle is inhabited by the starving and homeless, but honest Poor. The second by those who live in Vice; and the third and innermost region at the centre is people by those who exist by Crime … the borders of this great lost land are not sharply defined. They are continually expanding and
contracting … the death of a breadwinner, a long illness, a failure in the city, or any one of a thousand other causes which might be named,
will bring within the first circle those who at present imagine themselves free from all danger of actual want.’
‘A Christmas Carol’
Nature is what we think of as pre-wiring and is influenced by genetic
inheritance and other biological factors. Nurture is generally taken as the influence of external factors after
conception e.g. the product of exposure, experience and learning on
an individual.
‘A Christmas Carol’
Dickens believed that the way that society treated its children was the true test of
society’s moral wealth.
‘A Christmas Carol’
Christmas celebrates the birth of a child -Jesus. Dickens saw the protection of childhood as vital and showed the dire consequences of the loss of childhood through Scrooge’s own experiences as a boy in Stave 2, and through
Tiny Tim, a symbol of the thousands of children injured in factories during the
Industrial Revolution.
Key information about the context
and Dickens’ message