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For other uses, see A Christmas Carol (disambiguation).
A Christmas Carol
A Christmas Carol frontpiece, first edition 1843.
Frontpiece, first edition 1843
Author Charles Dickens
Country United Kingdom
Language English
Genre(s) Novella
Publisher Chapman and Hall
Publication date 19 December 1843
Media type Print (Hardback, Paperback)
ISBN 3-15-009150-0 (with German translation by Reclam)

A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas (commonly known as A Christmas Carol) is a novella by Charles Dickens[1] first published on December 19, 1843 with illustrations by John Leech. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom, the UK or Britain,is a Sovereign state located English is a West Germanic language originating in England and is the First language for most people in the United Kingdom, the United States A novella is a written, Fictional Prose Narrative longer than a Novelette but shorter than a Novel. Publishing is the process of production and dissemination of Literature or Information &ndash the activity of making information available for public view Events 324 - Licinius abdicates his position as Roman Emperor. A hardcover (or hardback or hardbound) is a Book bound with rigid protective covers (typically of cardboard covered with Cloth Paperback, softback, or softcover describe and refer to a Book by the nature of its binding. A novella is a written, Fictional Prose Narrative longer than a Novelette but shorter than a Novel. Events 324 - Licinius abdicates his position as Roman Emperor. Year 1843 ( MDCCCXLIII) was a Common year starting on Sunday (link will display the full calendar of the Gregorian Calendar (or a Common John Leech (August 29 1817&ndashOctober 29 1864 in London was an English Caricaturist. [2] The story was an instant success, selling over six thousand copies in one week, and the tale has become one of the most popular and enduring Christmas stories of all time.

Contemporaries noted that the story's popularity played a critical role in redefining the importance of Christmas and the major sentiments associated with the holiday. A Christmas Carol was written during a time of decline in the old Christmas traditions. [3] "If Christmas, with its ancient and hospitable customs, its social and charitable observances, were in danger of decay, this is the book that would give them a new lease", said English poet Thomas Hood. Thomas Hood ( 23 May 1799 &ndash 3 May 1845) was a British Humorist and Poet. [4]

Contents

Plot introduction

A Christmas Carol is a Victorian morality tale of an old and bitter miser, Ebenezer Scrooge, who undergoes a profound experience of redemption over the course of one night. Culture The Victorian fascination with novelty resulted in a deep interest in the relationship between modernity and cultural continuities Morality Play is a detective story by Barry Unsworth, a Man Booker Prize -winning author for his book Sacred Hunger Published in 1996 by A miser is a person who is reluctant to spend Money, sometimes to the point of forgoing even basic comforts Ebenezer Scrooge is the Main character in Charles Dickens ' 1843 Novel, A Christmas Carol. Mr. Scrooge is a financier/money-changer who has devoted his life to the accumulation of wealth. He holds anything other than money in contempt, including friendship, love and the Christmas season.

Plot summary

Ebenezer Scrooge encounters "Ignorance" and "Want" in A Christmas Carol.
Ebenezer Scrooge encounters "Ignorance" and "Want" in A Christmas Carol.

Stave I: Marley's Ghost

On a snowy Christmas Eve, seven years to the day after the death of his business partner Jacob Marley, Ebenezer Scrooge and his downtrodden clerk Bob Cratchit are at work in Scrooge’s counting-house. Jacob Marley (d 24 December 1836) is a Fictional character whose Ghost appears in the Charles Dickens Novel, Robert "Bob" Cratchit is a fictional character the abused underpaid clerk of Ebenezer Scrooge in the Charles Dickens story A Christmas Carol Scrooge's nephew, Fred, arrives with seasonal greetings and an invitation to Christmas dinner, but Scrooge dismisses him with "Bah! Humbug!", declaring that Christmas is a fraud. Two gentlemen collecting charitable donations for the poor are likewise rebuffed by Scrooge, he insists that the poor laws and workhouses are sufficient to care for the poor, and that "If they would rather die [than go there], they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population". This article deals chiefly with the English Poor Laws covering England and Wales As he and his clerk prepare to leave, he grudgingly permits Cratchit one day’s paid holiday the following day.

After dinner Scrooge returns home to his cheerless rooms in an otherwise deserted building, and a series of supernatural experiences begins. His door knocker appears to transform into Marley’s face; a “locomotive hearse” seems to mount the dark stairs ahead of him; the pictures on the tiles in his fireplace transform into images of Marley's face. Finally all the bells in the house ring loudly, there is a clanking of chains in the cellar and on the stairs, and the ghost of Marley passes through the closed door into the room.

The ghost warns Scrooge that if he does not change his ways, he will suffer Marley’s fate. He will walk the earth eternally after death, invisible among his fellow men, burdened with chains, seeing the misery and suffering he could have alleviated in his life but now powerless to intervene. Marley has arranged Scrooge’s only chance of redemption: three spirits will visit him on successive nights, and they may help change him and save him from his fate. As Marley leaves, Scrooge gets a nightmare glimpse of the tormented spectres who drift unseen among the living, and, shattered, he falls into bed and sleeps.

Stave II: The First of the Three Spirits

The Ghost of Christmas Past, a strange mixture of young and old, male and female, with a light shining from the crown of its head, appears at the stroke of one. The Ghost of Christmas Past is a character in the well-known work of the English novelist Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol. It leads Scrooge on a journey to some of his past Christmases, where key events shaped his life and character. He sees his late sister Fan, who intervened to rescue him from lonely exile at boarding school, and, recalling his recent treatment of Fan’s son Fred, Scrooge feels the first stirrings of regret. They revisit a merry Christmas party given by Fezziwig, Scrooge‘s kindly apprentice-master, and Scrooge thinks guiltily of his own behaviour toward Bob Cratchit. Finally, he is reminded how his love of money lost him the love of his life, Belle, and the happiness this cost him. Furious, Scrooge turns on the spirit, snuffs it like a candle with its cap, and finds himself back in bed, where he instantly falls asleep.

Stave III: The Second of the Three Spirits

Scrooge wakes at the stroke of one, confused to find it is still night. After a time he rises and finds the second spirit, the Ghost of Christmas Present, in an adjoining room, on a throne made of Christmas food and drink. Ghost of Christmas Present' is a character in one of the best-known works of the English novelist Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol This spirit, a great genial man in a green coat lined with fur, takes him through the bustling streets of London on the current Christmas morning, sprinkling the essence of Christmas onto the happy populace. They observe the meagre but happy Christmas celebrations of the Cratchit family and the sweet nature of their lame son Tiny Tim, and when the Spirit foretells an early death for the child if things remain unchanged, Scrooge is distraught. He is shown what others think of him: the Cratchits toast him, but reluctantly, and “a shadow was cast over the party for a full five minutes“. Scrooge's nephew and his friends gently mock his miserly behaviour at their Christmas party, but Fred maintains his uncle's potential for change, and Scrooge demonstrates a childlike enjoyment of the celebrations.

They travel far and wide, and see how even the most wretched of people mark Christmas in some way, whatever their circumstances. The Ghost, however, grows visibly older, and explains he must die that night. He shows Scrooge two pitiful children huddled under his robes who personify the major causes of suffering in the world, "Ignorance" and "Want", with a grim warning that the former is especially harmful. At the end of the visitation, the bell strikes twelve. The Ghost of Christmas Present vanishes and the third spirit appears to Scrooge.

Stave IV: The Last of the Three Spirits

The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come takes the form of a grim spectre, robed in black, who does not speak and whose body is entirely hidden except for one pointing hand. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is a character in English novelist Charles Dickens 's A Christmas Carol. This spirit frightens Scrooge more than the others, and harrows him with a vision of a future Christmas with the Cratchit family bereft of Tiny Tim. A rich miser, whose death saddens nobody and whose home and corpse have been robbed by ghoulish attendants, is revealed to be Scrooge himself: this is the fate that awaits him. Without it explicitly being said, Scrooge learns that he can avoid the future he has been shown and alter the fate of Tiny Tim, but only if he changes. Weeping, he swears to do so, and awakes to find that all three spirits have visited in just one night, and that it is Christmas morning.

Stave V: The End of It

Scrooge changes his life and reverts to the generous, kind-hearted soul he was in his youth. He anonymously sends the Cratchits the biggest turkey in the butcher shop, meets the charity workers to pledge an unspecified but impressive amount of money, and spends Christmas Day with Fred and his wife.

The next day Scrooge catches his clerk arriving late and pretends to be his old miserly self, before revealing his new persona to an astonished Cratchit. He assists Bob and his family, becomes an adopted uncle to Tiny Tim, who does not die, and gains a reputation as a kind and generous man who embodies the spirit of Christmas in his life.

Explanation of the book's title

Originally a medieval round dance and then a word for a particular type of ballad[5], by Dickens' time the word carol had come closer to its modern meaning, being a joyful hymn specific to Christmas. A hymn is a type of Song, usually religious specifically written for the purpose of praise adoration or Prayer, and typically addressed to a deity/deities Dickens takes this musical analogy further, dividing the novella into five "staves", instead of chapters. In standard Western Musical notation, the staff ( AmE) or stave

Characters

Supporting

Major themes

The story deals extensively with two of Dickens' recurrent themes, social injustice and poverty, the relationship between the two, and their causes and effects. In law enforcement a fence is an individual who knowingly buys stolen property for later resale in a (usually legitimate market Social Injustice is a concept relating to the perceived unfairness or injustice of a Society in its divisions of rewards and burdens Poverty (also called penury) is deprivation of common necessities that determine the quality of life including food clothing shelter and safe Drinking water, and It was written to be abrupt and forceful with its message, with a working title of "The Sledgehammer. " The first edition of A Christmas Carol was illustrated by John Leech, a politically radical artist who in the cartoon "Substance and Shadow" printed earlier in 1843 had explicitly criticised artists who failed to address social issues. Dickens wrote in the wake of British government changes to the welfare system known as the Poor Laws, changes which required among other things, welfare applicants to "work" on treadmills, as Scrooge points out. The word Treadmill, originally a type of mill operated by a person treading steps of a wheel to grind grain now designates a piece of indoor sporting equipment for running without Dickens asks, in effect, for people to recognise the plight of those whom the Industrial Revolution has displaced and driven into poverty, and the obligation of society to provide for them humanely. Failure to do so, the writer implies through the personification of Ignorance and Want as ghastly children, will result in an unnamed "Doom" for those who, like Scrooge, believe their wealth and status qualifies them to sit in judgement on the poor rather than to assist them.

Scrooge “embodies all the selfishness and indifference of the prosperous classes who parrot phrases about the ‘surplus population’ and think their social responsibilities fully discharged when they have paid their taxes. ” [6]

Allusions to actual history, geography and current science

Scrooge offends the Ghost of Christmas Present by suggesting that the Spirit's name is linked to a recent attempt to close bakers' shops on Sundays and Christmas Day. (Poor people like the Cratchits, who had no oven at home, took their Sunday and Christmas meals to the bakers' to be roasted just as Dickens describes in the book, because the law forbade bread to be baked on that day. An oven is an enclosed compartment for Heating, Baking or Drying. Closing the shops would deprive them of what might be their only hot meat meal of the week. ) The Spirit angrily retorts:

“There are some upon this earth of yours. . . who lay claim to know us, and who do their deed of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and to all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us. " (The Ghost of Christmas Present, A Christmas Carol, Stave Three)

This is a reference to the repeated attempts during the 1830s of Sir Andrew Agnew, MP for Wigtownshire, to introduce a Sunday Observance Bill in Parliament which would have closed the bakeries and restricted many other Sunday pleasures of the poorer classes. A Member of Parliament, or MP, is a representative elected by the voters to a Parliament. The County of Wigtown, or Wigtownshire ( Gaelic: Siorrachd Bhaile na h-Uige) is a Registration county in the south west of Scotland The Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is the supreme legislative body in the United Kingdom and British overseas territories [7] Dickens was violently opposed to Agnew's plans and had attacked them in a pamphlet published under a pseudonym. [8]

Dickens' reading

A Christmas Carol was the subject of Dickens' first ever public reading, given in Birmingham Town Hall to the Industrial and Literary Institute on 27 December 1852. This was repeated three days later to an audience of 'working people', and was a great success by his own account and that of newspapers of the time. Over the years Dickens edited the piece down and adapted it for a listening, rather than reading, audience. Excerpts from A Christmas Carol remained part of Dickens' public readings until his death.

Adaptations and sequels

Main article: List of A Christmas Carol adaptations

The work has been adapted to theatre, opera, film, radio, and television countless times. A Christmas Carol is a novella by Charles Dickens. Since its first publication in 1843 it has been adapted for theatre film television radio and opera numerous Theatre (or theater, see spelling differences) is the branch of the Performing arts defined by Bernard Beckerman as what "occurs when one Opera is an art form in which Singers and Musicians perform a Dramatic work (called an opera which combines a text (called a Libretto Radio is the transmission of signals by Modulation of electromagnetic waves with frequencies below those of visible Light. Television ( TV) is a widely used Telecommunication medium for sending ( Broadcasting) and receiving moving Images, either monochromatic

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Dickens described A Christmas Carol as his "little Christmas book". Letter to John Forster quoted by Mitsuharu Matsuoka (7 May 1998). John Forster's "The Life of Charles Dickens". Cecil Palmer. Retrieved on 2007-12-13. Year 2007 ( MMVII) was a Common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar in the 21st century. Events 1294 - Saint Celestine V abdicates the papacy after only five months Celestine hoped to return to his previous life
  2. ^ Dickens sent out advanced presentation copies on the 17th while the official release date was the 19th. He was sold out by the 22nd. (see Hearn (2004), pg. xiviii)
  3. ^ Dickens and A Christmas Carol. Retrieved on 2007-04-06. Year 2007 ( MMVII) was a Common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar in the 21st century. Events 46 BC - Julius Caesar defeats Caecilius Metellus Scipio and Marcus Porcius Cato in the Battle of Thapsus
  4. ^ Thomas Hood (1844). "Hood's Magazine and Comic Review".  
  5. ^ Wiktionary entry for carol. Retrieved on 2007-02-13. Year 2007 ( MMVII) was a Common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar in the 21st century. Events 1258 - Baghdad falls to the Mongols, and the Abbasid Caliphate is destroyed
  6. ^ Slater, Michael (ed),. Charles Dickens, The Christmas Books Volume 1, Penguin 1971, p. xiv.
  7. ^ Slater, op. cit. , 206.
  8. ^ Sunday Under Three Heads by "Timothy Sparks" aka Charles Dickens, at www.charlesdickens.org. Retrieved on 2008-02-13. 2008 ( MMVIII) is the current year in accordance with the Gregorian calendar, a Leap year that started on Tuesday of the Common Events 1258 - Baghdad falls to the Mongols, and the Abbasid Caliphate is destroyed

External links

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