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,
“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
The movie Four Christmases has two main characters are Vince Vaughn (Brad) and Reese Witherspoon (Kate). This movie is about an unmarried couple that has no plans of getting married or having children anytime soon. Every Christmas they plan an adventurous vacation for the two of them. They do this to avoid going to all of their families’ houses for the holiday. This year Kate and Brad planned to go to Fiji for vacation, but the weather took a turn for the worst and they weren’t able to go. Due to the weather, their flight got cancelled. The news caught them on live television alerting their families that they were now available for Christmas. Both Brad and Kate’s families are divorced, so there were four families to visit. They plan
Behaving wrong could ruin many friendships. Especially the ones you love. A Christmas Carol is a perfect example of this. It shows how greed and anger can destroy some great companionships. The main character, Ebenezer Scrooge, is the very greedy man of this play/movie. All he cares about is making money and using it all on himself. Until he gets visited by three ghosts which are the past, the present, and the future. This drama and movie have many similarities, yet many differences.
Family portrays an important part in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol throughout the entire story. The three main points I am going to focus on are Scrooge’s relationship with Fred and family, Bob Cratchit’s family, and the effect Scrooge’s approach towards finances, work, and peers had on his relationships.
In the fictional play, A Christmas Carol: Scrooge and Marley, by Israel Horovitz, Scrooge’s first impression is not very good. He refuses to donate to the poor, he dismisses family who want a relationship, and he is miserable and tries to make others the same way. When two men come to see Scrooge, they were asking for donations for the poor. Scrooge, being one of the wealthiest people in the community, is very dismissive, wrongfully so, and asks the two men to leave empty handed. When Scrooge asks if there are workhouses for the poor to go to, the men explain that most people would rather die than to go there. In response Scrooge states, “If they would rather die, than they had better do it and decrease the surplus in population.” (649) When
In this essay I will be talking about how Dickens presents Scrooge’s fear in A Christmas Carol. It is about how Scrooge’s change throughout the novel through various techniques Dickens uses to convey this.
was no then they had to change for the better as no one wants to be
It is hard to believe that there is anyone on the planet that hasn't heard of the story "A Christmas Carol". Although it isn't hard to believe that people do not realize that there are differences between movies and novels. In this case, that fits right into that subject. Here are some of the differences between the movie and the novel.
in done by creating stages and builds up to the finale of the ghost of
A pill bug is an insect that forms a hard shell around its soft flesh whenever startled or scared. Just like this pill bug, humans guard themselves from anything that hurts them without realizing that they are shutting out the most precious moments of their lives. Ebenezer Scrooge, the main character of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, is a cold man. He finds what he defines as true happiness in the form of money and wealth. At first he only seems to be a machine living in a human form, but as Scrooge's true journey and hardships are revealed, it becomes difficult to blame only Scrooge for his independence. It is inevitable that Scrooge's rudeness and impudent ferocity towards people led to the mistreatment of his dead body, but Scrooge's walls were not built for nothing. As the story progresses, and his true story from start to finish is revealed. There is no one person to blame, for it was the wrong of everyone. As Blaise Pascal once said, “All of humanity's problems stem from a man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
make him a better writer, and he felt that he 'must spend at least the
In "A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens, Ebenezer Scrooge undergoes a transformation as a result of his encounters with three ghosts and becomes a kind, happy, and generous man. His greedy, cruel, and grumpy demeanor is replaced seemingly overnight, but he doesn’t just wake up and decide to be nice. It takes three Spirits to change his outlook on life - The Ghosts of Christmases Past, Present, and Future. The Ghost of Christmas Past makes Scrooge begin to regret his selfishness, and the Ghost of Christmas Present begins to teach him about others. This second Ghost helps to make him realize that money doesn't buy happiness. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, however, teaches the most profound lesson of all: unless he changes, no one will care if Scrooge dies. Because of the Ghosts, by Christmas morning Ebenezer Scrooge is a completely different person from the man who went to bed on Christmas Eve.
In his younger years, Wells had possessed a natural writing ability. This would later give him a capability to create works of literature that would
but one thing he was rich in was happiness. Bob earned 15 ‘bob’ a week
It is hard to state for sure, if his inspiration for writing laid mostly in his genetically inherited poetical cells or in his life experience. When we look at his father's occupation, we find nothing striking that would have something in common with writing. His father was an architect. So let's have a look at his mother. She had a long history of mental instability and consequently committed a suicide.
How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1966&2000) explains not only the life of the Grinch but the Whos as well. Through the theorists of Karen Horney and Erik Erikson, viewers can learn why the Grinch’s personality is formed. Not only had it formed, but through the years it transformed.