Nineteenth-century novel, Year 10: the poor in 1840s Britain, language and the narrator's voice (A Christmas Carol option)

1843

提示Early in Queen Victoria's reign, in the decade later called the Hungry Forties.

为什么It came out on 19 December and the first edition had sold out by Christmas Eve.

Into the workhouse

提示Scrooge asks whether they are still in operation.

为什么Conditions were made deliberately harsh so that only the desperate would ask. Families were split up. This is why the collectors say many would rather die than go there.

Thomas Malthus

提示A clergyman and economist; ideas like his are named after him.

为什么Scrooge's phrase about the surplus population echoes this argument. Dickens gives it to a miser so that the reader hears how it sounds when applied to real people.

Debt

提示He owed money he could not pay.

为什么Dickens was taken out of school and sent to work in a factory that made boot blacking. The memory of that poverty fed his writing about poor children.

Ragged schools

提示Named after the state of their pupils' clothes.

为什么He visited the one at Field Lane. What he saw there fed into the figures of Ignorance and Want.

The narrator, speaking directly to the reader

提示Not a character in the story.

为什么The narrator of this book chats, jokes and gives opinions. The friendly voice at the reader's elbow is part of how the book persuades.

cold

提示A temperature.

为什么His coldness comes from inside. “No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him.” Cold and fog are attached to him all through the first stave.

Human warmth and generosity

提示Think of what Fezziwig's and the Cratchits' rooms are full of.

为什么Scrooge keeps the coal-box in his own room. Warm, bright firesides appear wherever people are kind to one another.

The greed and selfish dealings of his life, which now weigh him down

提示Look at what the links are made from.

为什么Dickens often turns an idea into something a reader can see. Marley's guilt is not described; it is hung on him in steel.

fog

提示It filled the streets and came in at every keyhole in Stave One.

为什么The weather changes with Scrooge. The first stave is dark and choked; the last is clear and full of bells.