Published on 19 December 1843 and priced at five shillings (equal to £23 in 2018 pounds), the first run of 6,000 copies sold out by Christmas Eve. Prior to that, Dickens had an interest in Christmas, and his first story on the subject was Christmas Festivities in 1835 followed by The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton in 1836.
Dickens advocated a humanitarian focus of the holiday, which influenced several aspects of Christmas that are still celebrated in Western culture today, such as family gatherings, seasonal foods and drinks, dancing, playing games and having a festive generosity of spirit.ĭickens wrote A Christmas Carol in response to the British social attitudes towards poverty and wished to use the novella as a means to put forward his arguments against it. The story portrays Scrooge as a paradigm for self-interest, and the possible repercussions of ignoring the poor, personified by the allegorical figures of Want and Ignorance.
After their visits, Scrooge is transformed into a kinder, gentler man. Scrooge is visited by the ghost of his former business partner Jacob Marley as well as the spirits of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come. The character is believed to have been influenced by Dickens’ conflicting feelings for his father, whom he both loved and demonised. Now, when our focus in on hunger and homelessness rather than joy in the streets, Scrooge is again a social figure placed in the center of unsettling economic realities.A Christmas Carol is a novella that recounts the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, a miserable and elderly London-based moneylender who is described in the novel as “a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner”. The Scrooge of the 1960s became a Freudian figure tormented by his past, who conjured up Marley as a way of calling for help and who turned on to Christmas and tuned into joys he had denied himself.
In the Depression era, while the British reaffirmed a traditional Carol, Americans interpreted Scrooge's transformation as the triumph of a new business ethic of service and sharing. The sophisticated decade preceding World War I treated the work for the first time as a story for children. By the 1870s, A Christmas Carol had become secular scripture, read as a retelling of the biblical Christmas story. Dickens's original story, written in 1843, provided proof that urbanization had not destroyed Christmas and that the old country traditions could flourish in the new cities.
According to Davis, six periods have shaped this cultural history, each contributing to the evolving culture-text of A Christmas Carol that is what we remember of all its parodies, piracies, and retellings.
0 kommentar(er)
