Dickens' Politial Point Flashcards
NOWADAYS WE THINK of A Christmas Carol as a private morality play and a nice Christmas tale to boot, but in 1843 Dickens was actually attacking a widely held
political belief
Dickens hid his criticism of political beliefs in the story of a wretched _____ who is saved by spiritual visitations.
miser
There was a theory afoot at that time, left over from the Puritanism of the previous two centuries and promulgated most forcefully by the British social thinker Thomas Malthus, that in helping the poor or in increasing food production to feed more people we would in fact encourage an increase in the number of the
impoverished
The upper classes believed that if they helped the lower classes, they would
simply procreate faster to take advantage of all that surplus gruel
Dickens caricatures this Malthusian thinking in Scrooge’s insistence that he wants nothing to do with the destitute and that if they would rather starve than live in the poorhouse or in debtors’ prison, then, by golly, “they had best ____ __ ___ __ __ ___ ________ ___ _______ __________.”
hurry up and do it and decrease the excess population
Dickens constructs Scrooge not because he’s unique but because he’s representative of
the powerful in society
The story is meant to change us and to change
society
We can take the perspective of ’A Christmas Carol’ as being an advocacy for ,
‘good / benevolent capitalism’
We can also see A Christmas Carol as a scathing critique of
‘bad / greedy / selfish capitalism’
The novella can be see as a form of political and __________ commentary.
economic
Dickens may not be calling for any type of revolution, but instead, just a paradigm shift: perhaps he is trying to guide so called, ‘bad capitalists’, to look at the world in a frame of ____ _______
‘good will’
Scrooge was perhaps constructed by Dickens in order to embody
“bad capitalism”
Despite the poor working conditions he subjects his employee to, Scrooge still does _________ with his profits.
nothing
