Analysis of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens, one of the greatest novelists in the Englishlanguage, was born in 1812 into a middle-class family of precariouseconomic status. His father was a clerk in the Navy Pay Office at thetime of Dickens’s birth; by the time Charles was ten, however, hisfather was in debtor’s prison, a victim of bad luck, mismanagement,and irresponsibility.
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In order to help support the family during this time of crisis, youngDickens went to work in the packing department of a factory thatmanufactured blacking–a compound of charcoal, soot, sugar, oil, andfat used to polish boots. This was a period of dirty and draininglabor which one critic has described as an experience of “heartrendingmonotony and ignominy.” Throughout his life Dickens would rememberthe harshness of the working conditions imposed on himself and theother boys in that blacking factory, and would direct much of hisenergy as a writer and moralist toward the reform of such oppressiveconditions. He would also always resent the humiliation and paincaused by his father’s imprisonment, despising both the folly of hisparent and the cruelty of the legal system that punished it soharshly.
Thus, Dickens’s outlook on life was shaped by an intimate awareness ofpoverty, filth, social humiliation, legal oppression, adultirresponsibility, and industrial squalor. It was also shaped by apowerful sympathy for the victims of these forces.
Following the dire experiences of his childhood, Dickens moved on tomore rewarding forms of employment, becoming a clerk in a law office,a newspaper reporter, and a recorder of Parliamentary debates.Eventually he began to publish sketches and stories, a…
…economicthinkers of Dickens’s day, did nothing that was not ultimatelymotivated by material self-interest. Scrooge is the reduction adabsurdum of that concept. In Scrooge, Dickens suggests, we have theparadigm of pure capitalist acquisitiveness, and in creating such afrightful figure, Dickens also presents a criticism of the system.Thus, the story is also an exploration of the influence of social andeconomic structures and institutions on human morality. In thecharacter of Scrooge, Dickens shows us how such systems can pervertthe people who invent and operate them.
And as we consider the criticism of unrestrained capitalism in AChristmas Carol, we ought to remember that Dickens’s story belongs tothe same era as another work on that subject, The Communist Manifestoby Karl Marx, written in 1848, five years after Scrooge embracedChristmas.
