A Christmas Carol - short review :: Free Essay Writer

A Christmas Carol - short review A Christmas Carol was published on 17th December 1843 in Victorian England. Victorian England was not a very nice place to live and Charles Dickens didn’t have the best childhood; his father was a clerk who was taken away from him and imprisoned when he was 12. Some people say this was how he became such a good writer – from all the problems he had as a child. England was a horrible place during these times – for example, there was child labour, where people got children to clean their chimneys as they were small enough, but it turned out the soot from the chimneys was carcinogenic, meaning it activated cancerous cells. There was also the Poor Law Act, which meant if you had lost an arm and were unable to work you had no way of gaining money. People also believed that you had to have money to be gentleman. There was the class system that meant if you were born into a working class family you would often die in a working class family – there were few chances to become rich and famous. Dickens often looked at life as a child; for example in Oliver Twist, David Copperfield and Great Expectations. This could be one of the reasons that Dickens chose A Christmas Carol to be at Christmas, as he thought it would appeal to the child in everyone. 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, â€Å"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