Nineteenth-century novel, Year 10: the poor in 1840s Britain, language and the narrator's voice (A Christmas Carol option)：全部卡片
整套按顺序列出——孩子看到之前，您可以先通读一遍。
- In which year was A Christmas Carol published? (year, four digits)
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.
- Under the Poor Law of 1834, where did a poor family in England usually have to go in order to get help?
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.
- The writer on population who argued that the number of people tends to grow faster than the supply of food
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.
- When Charles Dickens was twelve his father was sent to prison. What for?
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.
- In 1843, shortly before writing the book, Dickens visited a free school for London's poorest children. What were such schools called?
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.
- As the first Spirit draws back Scrooge's bed-curtains, someone says they are as close to it “as I am now to you, and I am standing in the spirit at your elbow.” Who is “I”?
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.
- From the description of Scrooge in Stave One: “The ____ within him froze his old features”.
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.
- In Scrooge's counting-house the clerk's fire is so small “that it looked like one coal”. What does fire stand for in this book?
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.
- What does the chain that Marley's Ghost drags stand for?
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.
- The weather on Christmas morning in Stave Five: “No ____, no mist; clear, bright, jovial, stirring, cold”.
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.
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