A Christmas Carol
by Charles Dickens
NOTES
I. Novel Information
Novel Information
• A Christmas Carol, a classic novel by
Charles Dickens, was written in six weeks
• First published on December 19, 1843
• 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.
About “A Christmas Carol”
• Written during a time of decline in Christmas
traditions
• A Victorian morality allegory of an old and
bitter miser, Ebenezer Scrooge, who undergoes
a profound experience of redemption over the
course of one night as visited by Spirits
• Scrooge is a miser who has devoted his life to
the accumulation of wealth. He holds anything
other than money in contempt, including
family, love, and the Christmas season.
Novel Information
A Christmas Carol was written in the
format of a song/carol.
Staves are verses or stanzas that a
composer uses to divide a song or
carol. Dickens divided the novel
into five staves.
Major themes
• The story deals with social injustice &
poverty.
• 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 in workhouses
A Victorian Christmas
Christmas had just been revived
shortly before A Christmas Carol
was written.
-1816– “Silent Night” was written by Joseph
Mohr.
-1840– Britain’s Queen Victoria married Prince
Albert from Germany. He brought with him
the tradition of the Christmas tree.
-1843– The first Christmas card was made. It
was a Christmas scene with a family eating
dinner, and it said, “A Merry Christmas and a
Happy New Year to you.”
II. Background Information:
Victorian England
Early Nineteenth-Century London (1800s)
• London was a growing, world city that awed
visitors with its size and grandeur.
• Transcontinental Railway= transportation
• London was the largest, most spectacular
city in the world. In 1800 the population of
London was around a million souls. That
number would swell to 4.5 million by 1880.
The Industrial Revolution was a time
of change in Europe marked by:
• the introduction of power-driven
machinery
• the growth of factories
• a huge increase in the production of goods
• a shift from a rural, agricultural society to a
more urban one
Dickens’s Victorian
England
As a young man, Charles Dickens
witnessed a decline in the traditional
celebration of Christmas in England. He
grew up in a poor suburb of London and
was familiar with poverty. He grew to learn
how the rich got richer and poor grew
poorer. He wrote about this social injustice
in A Christmas Carol. Because of the
Industrial Revolution, many employers
wouldn’t even give their employees
Christmas Day off, including Scrooge.
Charles Dickens had experienced poverty as a
child, and he was very concerned about the poor
people of England.
He raised money to help people in need by
reading A Christmas Carol at charity events.
Scrooge’s story brought about other changes too.
For example, because of the book,
• a factory owner began closing his factory every
Christmas and giving turkeys to of all his
employees
• a home for disabled children was started
Allegory- a symbolic story
(Scrooge)-Victorian Elite/wealthy of London
(Cratchit)- Impoverished of suburbs
In Victorian England, poor people usually
did not get much financial help. Even
young children, sick people, and the elderly
went without assistance from the
government (monarchy) or charities.
Social Classes
• Rich and poor people lived very close
to each other because the city was
crammed with people.
• Thousands of horse-drawn vehicles
cluttered the roads and street
sweepers had tons of manure to
clean up.
Life of Poverty
• No public sanitation system or running water;
disease was rampant in the streets of Camden
Town. Raw sewage flowed through open
drains in the streets into the river.
• People didn’t wash a lot. They didn’t wash
their clothes or bathe. The smell was
unbearable.
What a life…
• Streets were dark at night. Houses burned
coal for heat and cooking, so the air was
always full of soot = pollution & smog
• Pick-pockets, prostitutes, drunks, and beggars
fill the streets.
If you were a poor, out-of-work
Londoner during this time, these
were your options:
• go to a workhouse
• beg on the street
• be thrown into prison
• Before 1834 the church was responsible for
the poor.
• After this workhouses were built. Many
families worked and lived here. It was very
badly paid with long hours and a high chance
of disease and death.
Workhouses
Workhouses were institutions where people were
put to work in exchange for food and shelter.
People in workhouses often
• had little or no heat
• used rags for blankets
• did not get nearly enough food
• were severely overworked and even beaten
Children often worked 16 hours a day, 6 days a
week for very small pay. Dickens fiercely opposed
this practice and wrote about it often.
3-2-1
name/date/LA#
• List 3 things your learned about A Christmas
Carol.
• List 2 things that you have learned about life
in 19th century Victorian England.
• List 1 thing you want to know more about
during this unit study.
ACC Pre-Unit Quick Write
1) Do you believe one person can significantly
change the way that he or she sees the world
and treats others? Why or why not?
2) What does it take to make people change their
ways?
3) If you were shown your past, present, and future
in one night, how do you think you would change
and why? (think internally)
4) Explain how important money and social status
are to you.