This document provides context and analysis about Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. It discusses Dickens' background and experiences that influenced his writing. It then analyzes key elements of A Christmas Carol, including its genre as a fable, Dickens' style, its portrayal of London, its focus on the domestic middle class, its use of sentiment to imagine others, and its approach to social reform through individual change rather than systemic overhaul. The document examines how Dickens wanted to train readers' imaginations and make them feel empathy and sympathy for others through the story.

1. ELIT 46C
Day 7
MERRY CHRISTMAS, EVERYONE!

2. Business
Paper 1 is due on Canvas, Friday by noon. Please
follow the instructions for uploading and allow
time for difficulties. I will be on email from
about 11 on.
Poetry “Performance” assignment:
◦ First: Arnold, “The Buried Life”: group?
◦ Then, I will let folks claim poems in random order.
English Inheritance Law (pre-Married Women’s
Property Acts)
◦ Women could inherit if specifically named in will.
◦ But if married, that inheritance would go to
husband.
◦ Entailment: titles, most large estates and fortunes
had to go to one male heir.
What participation looks like today:
◦ Three points possible today.
◦ One individual point for something you say in
full discussion.
◦ Two points if you participate in our group
activity AND your group says something to the
class.
Be sure to clearly claim both types of points in
your participation self-report at the end of
class.

3. Humbug (following Jasmin)

4. Why Dickens?
AND WHY A CHRISTMAS CAROL?

5. Charles Dickens: 1812-1870
Paternal grandparents were butler and housekeeper for
aristocrats.
His father was able to climb into the lower middle-class
as a clerk in the Navy Pay Office. Decent job, good
pension.
However, in 1824, John Dickens was forced into
Marshalsea Debtors Prison for unpaid debts. His wife and
youngest kids went with him.
Charles was 12; he was boarded, but he could not attend
school.
Worked in Warren’s Blacking Factory, making shoe polish
for about a year.
Never returns to school, but picks up shorthand writing
and becomes a court reporter.
Demonstrates aptitude for journalism and works his way
up: reporter for Morning Chronicle, 1834-36.

6. Publishing Highlights
1838: Oliver Twist. Quickly became famous.
1843: A Christmas Carol
1850: David Copperfield
1856: Bleak House
1859: A Tale of Two Cities
1861: Great Expectations
1865: Our Mutual Friend
He also published weekly magazines from
1850-70: first Household Words and then All
The Year Round.
Grave in Poet’s Corner, Westminster Abbey, London

7. Scandal and Trains
Married Catherine Hogarth in 1836
May have been romantically attached to her
sister Mary who lived with them and who died in
1837.
1857: met 18-year-old actress Ellen Ternan.
Dickens falls in love. They probably had a
relationship.
1858: separated from Catherine. Never saw her
again after she moved out.
1865: Dickens not injured (but much shaken up)
by the Staplehurst railway crash.
1870: dies of a stroke, buried in Poet’s Corner in
Westminster Abbey.

8. Why a ghost story
for Christmas?

9. A Christmas Carol: Genre
Maddi’s question is important here.
A fable?
--“Once upon a time…” (2).
--short
--an obvious moral (Jelsie: medieval morality plays)
--supernatural
--lack of fully-rounded characters or much
characterization—even with Scrooge
◦ Rodrigo: missing motivations
◦ Emma: people as objects
His full novels are much less like fables. Lots of
characters, lots of development, no supernatural.
Mostly realist, but with a slightly skewed sensibility.

10. A Christmas Carol: Style
How would you describe Dickens’s style based on
ACC?
◦ Narrator?
◦ Dialogue: does everyone speak the same?
◦ heteroglossia: (Bakhtin)
“His blankets?” asked Joe.
“Whose else’s do you think?” replied the woman.
“He isn’t likely to take cold without ‘em, I dare
say.”
“I hope he didn’t die of anything catching? Eh?”
said old Joe, stopping in his work and looking up.
“Don’t you be afraid of that,” returned the
woman. “I an’t so fond of his company that I’d
loiter about him for such things, if he did. Ah!”
(56)
“How are you?” said one.
“How are you?” returned the other.
“Well!” said the first. “Old Scratch has got his own at last,
hey?”
“So I am told,” returned the second. “Cold, isn’t it?”
“Seasonable for Christmas time. You’re not a skaiter, I
suppose?”
“No. No. Something else to think of. Good morning!”
Not another word. That was their meeting, their
conversation, their parting. (52)

11. The City (London)
Murray Baumgarten: “Realism in Dickens’s
time was magical, for the city was a fairy-tale
come to life, grim, exhilarating, and
transformative.”
There are very few moments in Dickens that
take place in the country. He just wasn’t
interested in it.
And why not?
Size of London; unprecedented.
◦ One million people in 1800
◦ Four million people by 1870.
◦ It became the largest city in the world.
Transformation during Dickens’s lifetime:
◦ In 1812, London: horse-drawn carts, carriages,
city walls and gates.
◦ By 1870: railroads from all four directions, sewer
system and drinking water viaduct by 1853,
underground already under construction by
1864.

12. The house fronts looked black enough, and the windows blacker, contrasting with the smooth white sheet of snow
upon the roofs, and with the dirtier snow upon the ground; which last deposit had been ploughed up in deep
furrows by the heavy wheels of carts and wagons; furrows that crossed and recrossed each other hundreds of times
were the great street branched off, and made intricate channels, hard to trace, in the thick yellow mud and icy water.
The sky was gloomy, and the shortest streets were choked up with a dingy mist, half thawed, half frozen, whose
heavier particles descended in a shower of sooty atoms, as if all the chimneys in Great Britain had, by one consent,
caught fire, and were blazing away to their dear hearts’ content. (33-34)
They left the busy scene and went into an obscure part of the town, where Scrooge had never penetrated before,
although he recognised its situation, and its bad repute. The ways were foul and narrow; the shops and houses
wretched; the people half-naked, drunken, slipshod, ugly. Alleys and archways, like so many cesspools, disgorged
their offences of smell, and dirt, and life, upon the straggling streets; and the whole quarter reeked with crime, with
filth, and misery. (53)
The poulterer’s shops were still half open and the fruiterers’ were radiant in their glory. There were great, round,
pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts […]. There were pears and apples, made, in the shopkeepers’
benevolence, to dangle from conspicuous hooks, that people’s mouths might water gratis as
they passed; there were piles of filberts, mossy and brown, recalling, in their fragrance,
ancient walks among the woods, and pleasant shufflings ankle deep through withered leaves;
Norfolk Biffins, squab and swarthy, setting off the yellow of the oranges and lemons [...] the
blended scents of coffee and tea were so grateful to the nose, [...] the raisins were so plentiful
and rare, the almonds so extremely white, the sticks of cinnamon so long and straight, the
other spices so delicious [...]. (34-35)

13. The domestic middle-class
Dickens does not spend a lot of time writing
about aristocrats or those who hold titles.
◦ much more interested in capitalists and their
employees—the whole range of what is
(incoherently) the new Victorian middle-class.
As part of that preoccupation, he’s interested
in tracing the inequality that exists in the
newly-developing system at multiple levels.
But who are his sympathies with here?
“They were not a handsome family; they were
not well dressed; their shoes were far from
being waterproof; their clothes were scanty;
and Peter might have known, and very likely
did, the inside of a pawnbroker’s. But they
were happy, grateful, pleased with one
another, and contented with the time; and
when they faded, and looked happier yet in
the bright sprinklings of the Spirit’s torch at
parting, Scrooge had his eye upon them, and
especially on Tiny Tim, until the last” (41-42).

14. Sentiment
I want to suggest that this novel is importantly about imagining other
people (remember that theme?).
What is the purpose of the Christmas spirits
(especially the Ghost of Christmas Present)?
◦ Make Scrooge imagine the lives of people.
◦ Show Scrooge how those other people view him.
It’s imagination training.
But it isn’t just Scrooge that Dickens wants to help with his imagine…
(Does it require the supernatural?)
Clearly sentimental: Dickens is very purposefully trying to make you
feel for them. What does he want you to feel? What emotions?
◦ Pity
◦ Sympathy
◦ Admiration
Does he want you to feel empathy?
How does he want us to imagine other people?

15. Social Reform
Grahame Smith: Dickens felt “rage and disappointment at a society which seemed to him to
tolerate ignorance, poverty, and suffering indefinitely.”
Frustrated with the pace of reform in modernity.
Targets of reform: schools, workhouses, factories, orphanages, slums, poverty, sanitary
conditions, the law, government and Parliament, unregulated capitalism, etc.
How do you see this at work in ACC?

16. But how does Dickens want this social reform to occur?
“Scrooge did better than his word. He did it all,
and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did
NOT die, he was a second father. He became
as good a friend, as good a master, and as
good a man, as the good old city knew, or any
other good old city, town, or borough, in the
good old world. Some people laughed to see
the alteration in him, but he let them laugh,
and little heeded them; for he was wise
enough to know that nothing ever happened
on this globe, for good, at which some people
did not have their fill of laughter in the outset”
(68)

17. Individual action vs. Systemic change
Social reform in ACC is individualist, not systemic.
Change yourself to change the world.
◦ Internal emotional change leads to individual action in the world.
“End Capitalism” vs. “I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.” (62).
And this, I want to suggest is a concern that runs through much of Dickens’s work: the dual
imperatives of
1. wanting to systematically overhaul society (on a large-scale) to make it more just.
2. a sense that, if only people were better individually, they would do more good and make the
world better.
◦ Not mutually exclusive, of course.
◦ But I want to suggest that Dickens swings between them, depending on which feels more convincing to
him at any given time.

18. Passage Explications
Each group will get one passage from another
Dickens novel.
Read it aloud in your group. (I will provide
more background about the novel if you need
it.)
Report back to full class:
1. A brief summary of your passage.
2. An important or memorable sentence.
3. How you see various
concerns/preoccupations of Dickens that we
discussed in class today.
4. What is Dickens trying to do in this passage?