What are the moral lessons Dickens wished to convey in A Christmas Carol, and how effectively does he convey them?

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What are the moral lessons Dickens wished to convey in A Christmas Carol, and how effectively does he convey them?

There are lots of different lessons that Dickens teaches the Victorian reader in A Christmas Carol. For example, he implies that there was terrible suffering at this time in London, and the rich didn’t do their job, which was to help relieve it.  Also, he gives the impression that money can alienate you from your fellow man, and true happiness only comes from love and family. Finally he implies that it is never too late to change your ways. These were all reasons why he wrote A Christmas Carol, over all he wanted to help the suffering people in London, as he knew how it felt to be on the rich side and the poor side. After being born in Portsmouth, into a well off family, and going to school in London, his father was arrested after getting into debt, and so were his family. They were then forced to work in a filthy warehouse. Such were the bad conditions for adults and children alike who were below the poverty line, that the life expectancy for a laborer in Bethnal Green was 15 years old.

        A message that Dickens gives the reader in this text is that in the Victorian era in London, the amount of people below the poverty line was huge, and the rich failed in their task to help relieve it. There were many rich people in the Victorian era, like Scrooge, who could afford to help the poor, but did not want to. Even when some “portly gentlemen” came to ask for a donation to help the poor through the cold winter months, Scrooge refused to help. Although the gentlemen tried very hard, saying things like “… the poor and destitute suffer greatly at the present time”, Scrooge would not budge and donate money to their worthy cause. The shows how tight fisted Scrooge and other rich people were, not giving anything to help those less fortunate than them. The word destitute makes the poor sound like they really are in need of clothes and food, and own no worldly possessions. Scrooge even has the audacity to ask “Are there no prisons? ... And the union workhouses … Are they still in operation?” This shows that Scrooge wants nothing to do with the poor and would rather that they were put in prison or workhouses than have them on the streets, making the city of London look bad. And the way he asks “… Are they still in operation?” suggests that because he has no friends and is on his own all the time, he does not know if they are still open, or if they have closed down, showing he wants absolutely nothing to do with the poor. After receiving a reply about people would rather die than go to union workhouses, Scrooge becomes so self-centered as to reply that “…they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population”. This makes Scrooge sound like an arrogant old man, and the words “…they had better do it…” make it sound like a threat, and they will regret crossing him if they do not do what he asks. It also implies just how bad industrialization has made London, with lots of homeless people, and others like Scrooge who wish they would just die, and leave the rich people on their own.

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Another of the morals of A Christmas Carol is how money can make you an outcast from society, and Dickens uses Scrooge as a perfect example to show the reader how egotistic the richer members of Victorian society could be. Dickens describes Scrooge as “A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping clutching, covetous old sinner!” These past participles reveal that Dickens was trying to make Scrooge sound as tight fisted and miserly as possible. They also reveal that Scrooge never spent any money and was therefore a dreadfully rich man, with no one to share his wealth with, the pile just got ...

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