ACC QUOTES AND ANNOTATIONS stave 1 Flashcards
STAVE 1:
“solitary as an oyster”
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he keeps himself to himself, hidden beneath a hard shell that he uses to protect himself from the world. However, inside that shell - like Scrooge - the oyster is soft and vulnerable. Also, and most tellingly, given time an oyster produces one of natures greatest changes - that of creating pearls out of sand. Scrooge, like an oyster, has great potential and Dickens reminds us of this during the opening of the book.
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STAVE 1:
“as hard and sharp as flint”
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He’s hard - and a life spent alone will certainly make you that - but hard things are also unbending, stubborn and become easily stuck in a single purpose. He isn’t flexible or capable of change - he’s rigid. The sharpness also suggests that he’s dangerous and can hurt you if you get too close, or handle him without care. But someone who is sharp is also smart - quick witted and intelligent - and this is something Scrooge clearly is as well.
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STAVE 1:
“Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?”
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suggesting that the poor should simpy use the workhouses and prisons that are setup for them if they can’t afford food. On one level, this reveals just how selfish and unreasonable he is: the workhouses were horrendous places to be, and a prison sentence forever. However, there is a defence here: Scrooge pays for the prisons and workhouses out of his taxes. In effect, he contributes to the government and supports their policy on how to deal with poverty; his attitude is that, beyond that, the poor aren’t his problem. In a lot of ways, this isn’t unreasonable. The problem here isn’t that Scrooge isn’t contributing directly to the poor, but that the government’s solutions were just so unreasonable.
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STAVE 1:
The poor should die if they want to, as it would “decrease the surplus population.”
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poor people who don’t want to go to the workhouses should just hurry up and died. He is referencing a famous essay by Thomas Malthus, who argued that at some point there would simply be too many people for society to support and that there was a “surplus” of population. Again, Scrooge is being very harsh here, people in the audience looked at the poverty around them and secretly agreed with what Scrooge said.
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