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Scrooge in A Christmas Carol

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Call for Change: Dickens’ Attempt to Improve Society, and Walt Disney’s Subversion Thereof

In a time in which the significance of Christmas gradually started to change, Charles Dickens, in accordance with these changes, wrote a Christmas tale: A Christmas Carol. The novella was published six days in advance of the Christmas celebrations of 1843; it was sold out three days later. Although a socially engaged narrative, Dickens’ work is not occupied with trivialities such as the introduction of Christmas cards; instead A Christmas Carol focuses on the transforming beliefs and values within society and endeavours to contribute to these changes. A hundred and forty years later, the story was (once again) retold: The Disney film …show more content…

In line with this change, Dickens’ contemporary George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) marked “the ideal of goodness entirely human” (Jenkins 143). In The Scriptures of Charles Dickens, Vincent Newey states that A Christmas Carol shows its readers a world in which the religious motive for celebrating Christmas has started to attenuate and a humanist motive to augment; evidence for this assumption is found in the first stave of the novella in the speech of Scrooge’s nephew:

But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round – apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that – as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of . . . when men and women seem . . . to think of people below them. (5)

Apart from this seemingly irrefutable evidence for Newey’s assumption, the novel demonstrates the increasing importance of Humanism in yet another way: Whereas Robinson Crusoe in the namesake novel by Daniel Defoe (written in 1719) still relied on a “call from heaven” to motivate change, the characters from A Christmas Carol do not (150). Instead, the Spirits show Scrooge “the horrors of self-exclusion and non-participation, hearth and home . . . put on a lively display” (Newey

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