The Structure of Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol"

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Charles Dickens’s, a British social reformer which has presented to an audience a brilliant novel: A Christmas Carol. The play is set in the mid 1900’s where the industrial revolution was introduced which resulted in inventions such as machines; people consequently were fleeing the countryside for work in city for good paying jobs, for good achieving business people this gave their business a massive amount of money but a small minority of people were underprivileged because money was distributed unfairly. The basis of the story is to show the audience that money alone cannot bring happiness, but it is how you use it.

The novel is incredibly carefully structured into five staves and the last stave and the first stave being total opposites of each other, while in between the middle staves, consist of three ghosts; ghost of Christmas past, Christmas present and future. These ghosts try to transform Scrooge completely from being a horrible and mean old man into a loving and caring person for his benefit as well as everyone else’s.

The beginning of the play initiates with the death of Scrooge’s business partner Jacob Marley. Charles Dickens exaggerates Marley’s death and Scrooge’s soul feels dead and his ability to be generous, kind and to love is gone.’ Scrooge was not dreadfully cut up by the death of the sad event but that was an excellent man of business on the very day of the funeral, and solemnized it with an undoubted bargain’ , this shows Scrooge has no feeling for his best friend and his death does no phase him. Dickens now compares Scrooge to the weather, e.g. ‘he carried his own low temperatures always about with him; this shows us Scrooge is cold hearted and spreads his cold emotion to everyone.

Scrooge is such a mi...

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...ch shows Cratchit expects to be fired but instead of being fired Scrooge doubles his work salary and Cratchit is overjoyed that he can pay for everything he needs. The audience is aware that Scrooge has changed for the long term instead of the short term. The very last line of the play Tiny Tim says ‘God bless everyone’, the audience think of all the Tiny Tim’s in the world suffering and that we can make a difference to their lives. Dickens wants the audience to be decent and kind human beings to one another which Scrooge has transformed to be.

Charles Dickens has succeeded in telling his message to the audience and to why the play has developed onto big productions as Disney’s 3D movie version , the novel also is still relevant in the world today because there are still a lot of social inequalities in the world and Dickens message can help us live better lives .

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