Other Characters

Question 1

Ignorance and Want (general) (Chapter 3)

Answer 1

• Seen with ghost of present - Dickens shows that children are in poverty as the audience is reading, no time for regret or waiting
• Almost apocalyptic warning
• Personifies poverty, represents the failings of society
• Ignorance - lack of education for children, boys described as ‘ignorant’ in is his letter/ignorance of society
• Want - biblical link to eve and temptation and mankind being punished,
• Dickens suggests that ignorance leads to want – if people are educated they can provide for their family, eliminating want, education is a tool to break the cycle of poverty
• Structure, the reader has just read about the celebrations at Freds, shocking
• Based on dickens experience of ‘ragged schooling’ - a school for children too wretched to go anywhere else, criticised the neglect by the state
• The writing on the boys brown and the syntax in ‘I see written that which is doom’ is a clear reference to biblical revelations (when many characters have things written on their bodies)
• This emphasis the importance of them by comparing them to the end of Christianity

Question 2

Ignorance and want (description analysis) (Chapter 3)

Answer 2

• ‘Wretched’ - unhappy, also used to express anger, possibly of dickens about society, links to it being a political diatribe
• ‘Yellow’ - illness, possibly jaundice
• ‘Meagre’ - lacking in quantity, malnourished
• ‘Wolfish’ - anthropomorphism, dehumanises them, survival nature, wolfs are symbolic of teachers in Europe and their lessons are not hard to swallow but necessary
• ‘Monster’ - again dehumanises, unnatural, a sign that somethings wrong with the natural order maybe showing faults of the class system, mankind created a monster?

Question 3

‘Another idol has displaced me (…) a golden one (…) beyond the chance of its sordid reproach’ - Belle (Chapter 2)

Answer 3

• He became numb to human emotions
• Religious imagery, King James Bible contains many warnings about worshipping idols
• Link between bible and gold which bible also condemns as unchristian ‘idols of the heathen are silver and gold’
• Poor are criticised and treated with disgust by the wealthy for being dirty
• May also be her suggesting the world’s criticism is sordid
• ‘Reproach’ may link to Scrooge’s father being distant, links to theme of attachment

Question 4

‘Fellow passengers to the grave’ - Fred