Dickens' Social Aims in A Christmas Carol

Dickens' Social Aims in A Christmas Carol

In this essay I am going to explain in detail; what Dickens is trying

to achieve by writing "A Christmas Carol". This will involve his aims,

which is that the poor should be treated with more compassion and how

he is going to achieve this, which involves opening the eyes of people

with enough wealth and power and by educating people to get rid of any

ignorance.

Dickens' tool that he creates and uses within his novel is a

caricature of the problem that he is aiming to put right, which is

that the poor should be treated with more compassion. This character

is known as Ebenezer Scrooge. Dickens also uses the festival of

Christmas to his advantage as it is a time for kindness and giving, so

dickens creates Scrooge to an exact contrast of them two things.

Scrooge is described in the novel as "Tight-fisted hand at the

grindstone", "a squeezing, and wrenching, grasping, scraping,

clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as a flint, from which

no steel had ever stuck out a generous fire; secret, and

self-contained, and solitary as an oyster." This description of

Scrooge emphasises what Dickens is trying to get across to the reader.

The last bit of this description is the most important, "Solitary as

an oyster" because an oyster is hard on the outside but inside it

contains a pearl which symbolises that it is what's on the inside that

counts.

Scrooge works in a business by himself although it was once a joint

business with Jacob Marley who died 7 years to date before the novel

was set, Scrooge therefore took over the business and is now very

wealthy. Dickens creates Scrooge in this ...

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...n immerge from the

second spirits cloak; "This boy is ignorance. This girl is want.

Beware of them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware

of this boy, for on his brow I see written which is Doom, unless the

writing be erased." This is saying that Dickens think that we need to

educate the poor to stop their ignorance and that the poor can help

themselves, but when the rich are wilfully ignorant we need to help

them to stop so that they can help change things to create a better

world for everyone. Dickens novel produced some immediate effects and

the poor were treated better by those who read the novel. Due to

Scrooge changing throughout the novel from one extreme (hard, cold and

dark) to another (soft, warm and light) it persuaded people who could

relate to Scrooge in some way that they could do the same.