Many people believed that Dickens wasn’t just someone who wanted to make money, even though he was a workaholic. What he really wanted to do was to provoke authority to take responsibility for the problems that people were having in the country and Christmas was the best time of the year to do this.
Dickens’ use of imagery in the novel gives a great sense of surroundings and what Scrooge and all the ghosts look like. For example, here is a line from A Christmas Carol, that is just about the weather,
“It was cold, bleak biting weather; foggy withal; and he could hear the people in the court outside, go wheezing up and down, beating their hand upon their breasts, and stamping their feet upon the pavement stones to warm them.”
Smiles and metaphors help us to portray and compare images in our heads and Dickens does this very well throughout the book.
In A Christmas Carol, Scrooge is the novel’s protagonist. We know this as everything in the book has some sort of connection with him.
In the novel Scrooge is represented as a misanthropist, i.e. a person who hates his fellow men. This kind of novel where a person changes their whole way of life from badness to goodness is known as a bildungsroman. Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol partly to make people aware of the terrible plight of the children of the poor.
Some people may not like Dickens’s novels but there are a lot of people who thought of Charles Dickens as a brilliant novelist and a great man. Here are just a few quotes from newspapers and from other authors.
The Sunday Observer (12th June 1870)
“In reality his target is not so much society as human nature.”
George Orwell on Dickens (1939)
The critic, Sealy, claimed that:
“Dickens believed in the power of imagination, that it can create o revolution of the human heart, just as his characters were transformed by the ghosts they conjured up. Dickens very much believed his readers would be transformed by his characters.”
To answer the question “To what extent do you believe Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol to be tale with moral?” I would say that I very much believe it as the book shows Scrooge’s progression throughout, changing from a grumpy, old misanthropist to a more altruistic kind of person. This is triggered by the three ghosts of Christmas past, present and future. Each ghost was heeded in order to change Scrooge’s whole way of life.
We notice Scrooge’s development from bad to good. Here are a few examples of his not so caring side: “Bah! Humbug!” is Scrooge’s first words in the book. Dickens does this to give off a sense that Scrooge will be rude and dismissive throughout the book. “Merry Christmas! What right do have to be merry?” Scrooge says this to his own nephew. “My clerk, with fifteen shilling a week, and a wife and family, talking about a merry Christmas. I’ll retire to Bedlam.” Scrooge hates the thought of people saying Christmas is merry, “I wish to left alone”. There aren’t many people that wish to be left alone during Christmas, but Scrooge is one of them. “I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry.” As Scrooge is a workaholic he hates to spend his money no matter what the cause.
These are only a few example of Scrooge’s meanness.
However Scrooge does change by the end of the novel. When he realises there is still time for him to change,
“I should have given him something.”
Here Scrooge feels sorry for the young boy that came to his door singing Christmas Carols as he didn’t give him anything - he just closed the door in his face.
“A merrier Christmas Bob my good fellow than I have given for you for many a year.”
Scrooge has undergone a miraculous change after the visit of the ghost of Christmas future. Clearly we can see the difference in Scrooge’s personality from the text.
‘A Christmas Carol’ was written by Charles Dickens in order to warn people of the terrible plight of the poor children. The moral of ‘A Christmas Carol’ is that you should be nice to people while you still can, so maybe they’ll have happier memories of you when you’re gone, and that it is never too late to change.
