Scrooge's Childhood In A Christmas Carol

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When the Ghost of Past Christmas shows Scrooge his childhood, appears according to David. E Robinson, “the Romantic conception of childhood as a special spiritual state of innocence.” (2). It didn’t exist in Victorian times, children who did not belong to an upper class were sent to work and forced to be adults. Scrooge receives visits from three ghosts, who show him images of the past, present, and future, and Scrooge experiences these visits in a dream-like way. The Ghost of Christmas Past takes Scrooge travel to his childhood. One of his memories is placed on the way to school. He remembers passing a group of children described in the following form: ‘All these boys were in great spirits, and shouted to each other, until the broad fields …show more content…

Gavin puts in, “although her statement refers to Romantic poetry, it can be extrapolated to refer to Romantic literature or literature in general: Romantic poetry constructed childhood as a desirable state, distinct from adulthood, for which adults longed: a lost, idealized, clear-visioned, divinely pure, intuitive, in-tune-with nature, imaginative stage of life, of whose spirit adults felt the loss and sought to capture in literature. (8). Argument 2: “Dickens focuses on the fact that we cannot take in the reality of children. In A Christmas Carol, the Ghost of Christmas Present lifts his robes and reveals two frightful and miserable figures that must been there all along. These figures are unseen by Scrooge and he suspects that they must be children, but, he's not sure. He knows they are children but cannot them as such; he observes only an absence in them of everything he thinks child like: "where graceful youth should have filled their features and touched them with its freshest tints ... and where angels have sat enthroned" he perceives perversion and degradation. In this scene, the ghost warns Scrooge saying "This boy is Ignorance, This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see written which is Doom, unless the writing be

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