A Christmas Carol Literary Analysis

The holiday season are often thought of as happy and joyous moments, which are intended to spend with close family and friends. People all over the world spend this time to think about all the things that are most important to a person’s life. Movies help portray the holiday season as a time to spend with loved ones, and a time where the greatest blessings are the things that are near and dear to one’s heart. Literature helps to provide a different perspective as to how one can look at a situation during the holidays. Charles Dickens’ novel A Christmas Carol and Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South are both examples as to how a person can gain another perspective from the main objective of the story. Both Dickens and Gaskell used certain situations

A Christmas Carol caused the reader to be aware of how poverty had a stranglehold on a majority of people in London. His use and type of language he uses helps create similes and metaphors in order to establish clear and vivid images of how characters that were used, portrayed his message. Dickens helps give the reader a partial image of the rich and poor social classes of London in 1843. He is known profoundly for how his literary work intertwined with actual events that took place in his own past. Charles Dickens uses themes that prove to have powerful reference points that have highlighted his own life, particularly Dickens youth and adolescence Having the experiences of becoming a warehouse worker at age 12, the humiliating shadow of prison and debt, questions regarding his social class and monetary value, coupled with the typical issues of law and reform preoccupied Dickens during his early life. These feelings followed him into his adult life as well, and are present in various forms in all of his writings. In most of his fictional works, Dickens’ compassion for people who are less fortunate and his desire to find the meaning behind an individual’s worth in the eyes of society, wealth, class, power, and

Poverty and ignorance for understanding each other, drove a deep wedge between the upper class and the lower classes in England. On one side of the spectrum, the wealthy businessman and royalty generated plenty of money, had unlimited resources at their disposals, and were experiencing the highest quality living conditions. The lower class had to endure a much more difficult lifestyle, which included beggars roaming the streets, and working class neighborhoods arising in the filth of decay and urban neglect. During the Victorian age, the class system became a staple as to how each group of people should be classified into. The rich and the poor kept their distances from each other, and both groups looked upon each other with mutual disrespect and loathing. The poor during that time were considered to be inferior of moral character by the rich. The major theme that Dickens wanted to portray was how poverty handicapped everyone except the rich. Employees were being exploited for pennies a day after working a full day’s shift. Food was few and far in between for many families during that time, and Dickens wanted these feelings to be expressed through his literature, in order for the reader to understand the feelings of the lower class. Being that Dickens suffered in this class firsthand, his form of relaying this information to the