How does Dickens present the Lower Classes in 'A Christmas Carol'?

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Sacred Heart Catholic High School

Liverpool Road

Merseyside

Centre Number: 34631

Name: Laura Bowes        

Date: October/November 2002

Title: How does Dickens present the Lower Classes in ‘A Christmas Carol’?

Stimulus: Introduction to text

               Teacher plan

Charles Dickens wrote his novels during the Victorian times. Britain was a harsh place at this time with the upper and lower classes being clearly separated. Dickens himself grew up as part of the lower classes, and so he knew what it was like. It was very hard for the poor to survive, many of them having no alternative but to go into the workhouses. This seemed to be the worst place to end up, as many people would rather have died than gone into the workhouses. When people went to the workhouses, they were separated from their families, forced to work long hours and hardly fed at all. The workhouse system was the upper classes solution to poverty, but it did not help at all. The lower classes were still living very hard lives.

        Dickens published ‘A Christmas Carol’ in 1843 to try to bring the lower classes hard lives to the attention of people who could do something about it; the upper classes. He decided to write a novel because he felt that more people would take an interest in a book rather than leaflet, because the attitude towards helping the poor was not good. In the novel, the main character, Scrooge, is used to personify the upper classes. The three ghosts are used to show that the poor are not all ‘idle’ and that some are genuinely in need.

        Before the ghosts came, Scrooge was ‘hard and sharp as flint’ and solitary as an oyster’. There is a lot of descriptive language used about Scrooge (in the 6th – 8th paragraphs) by Dickens, which gives the impression that Scrooge was bitter, cold and lonely. He believed that if people were poor, it was not his ‘business’ and he just wanted ‘to be left alone’. He refused to give money to the poor at Christmas and said ‘Are there no prisons?’ and said that ‘every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a steak of holly through his heart’. From this, we can tell that Scrooge did not care about the situation of the poor in London at the time and did not see any reason why he should help. This view was commonly held by Victorian people when Dickens wrote the novel. I know this because if the upper did actually try to help the lower classes, then the inhumane workhouse system would not have been in existence.

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        Scrooge’s attitude towards Christmas completely contrasts to everyone else’s attitude in the novel. The ordinary people walking around on Christmas Eve were ‘jovial and full of glee’ whereas Scrooge ‘carried his own low temperature around with him’. He said that they had nothing to be merry about because every Christmas they found themselves ‘a year older, and not an hour richer’. Nevertheless, the poor in this novel find their happiness with the simplest things, as we are shown by the ‘Ghost of Christmas Present’.

        The ‘Ghost of Christmas Present’ is portrayed as a warm character with a ‘jovial air’ ...

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