Читать книгу A Christmas Carol - Grace Moore - Страница 7

BACKGROUND & CONTEXT

Historical setting

Writing at a time when the balance of political power in Britain had shifted from the landed gentry to the manufacturing middle classes, Dickens wanted to rally the public into action. The Great Reform Bill of 1832 had given many male middle-class property owners the right to vote for the first time. While the aristocracy had long believed in the idea that with noble birth came responsibility (noblesse oblige), those who had risen to social dominance through their own hard work as factory owners or captains of industry generally did not share this belief, subscribing instead to the idea that with enough effort anyone could succeed. Like his great friend and mentor, the writer and philosopher Thomas Carlyle, Dickens was deeply agitated by what he perceived as the inertia of the wealthy middle classes. Dickens’ opinion was that those with riches and influence had a duty to take care of those who were less fortunate than themselves, particularly since their wealth was often founded on the labours of a poorly paid workforce. Dickens was to be a lifelong critic of this negligence, condemning it most witheringly in Little Dorrit (1855–1857).

In A Christmas Carol, Dickens continued the deep commitment to social reform he had begun in novels like Oliver Twist (1837–1839) and Nicholas Nickleby (1838–1839), both of which sought to expose poverty and privation. In Nicholas Nickleby, Dickens exposed the notorious Yorkshire Schools and their scandalous treatment of the children who were abandoned to them. Unwanted or illegitimate children were sent away to these schools by people who never wanted to see them again. Many of the children died, while those who survived were kept in subhuman conditions. In Oliver Twist, Dickens hit out at the Poor Law Amendment Act, which had done away with the system of parish relief, whereby paupers were given aid so that they could remain in their own homes. In the past, those who had fallen on hard times were encouraged to live among their neighbours and to get themselves back on their feet with the support of the community. This relatively humane system was replaced by the workhouses.

Purported to be charitable institutions, workhouses centralised the distribution of aid and provided those in need with a roof over their heads and a (paltry) food allowance. They were perceived by many members of the governing classes as a deterrent to idleness, but they rapidly became a source of terror to the poor, who regarded them as akin to prisons. Working people lived in fear of having to resort to ‘the house’. Conditions within the workhouses were horrific – starvation and abuse were rife, and those with authority frequently sought to punish inmates for their misfortune. Dickens uses the relationship between the miser and his clerk to draw attention to the enormous gap between the living conditions of masters and their workers, carefully emphasising the human element of the story by allowing the reader to enter into Bob’s happy home and to see his family’s daily struggles to make ends meet.

Author’s historical context

Dickens seems to have enjoyed the writing of A Christmas Carol immensely. On 2 January 1844, he wrote to a friend:

Charles Dickens wept, and laughed, and wept again, and excited himself in a most extraordinary manner, in the composition; and thinking whereof, he walked about the black streets of London, fifteen and twenty miles, many a night when all the sober folks had gone to bed (Letters: 4, 2).

It was unusual for Dickens to express this much pleasure in the creative process. All too frequently in his career, he was writing in installments and up against a deadline, but his commentary here suggests that the shorter format of the novella – a work longer than a short story, but shorter than a novel – suited him.

While he may be exaggerating about the distances he walked, Dickens frequently took to the streets when he was working on a project and unable to sleep, and he often gained inspiration by wandering through the slum areas and observing them. Certainly, there are graphic scenes towards the novella’s close that demonstrate Dickens’ first-hand experience of the capital city’s seedier side, and it is likely that his forays into the most neglected areas of London strengthened his resolve that the work would deal a blow for reform like a ‘Sledge hammer’ (Letters: 3, 459), as he promised a fellow social reformer, Dr Thomas Southwood Smith.

A Christmas Carol appeared at the beginning of the decade that came to be known as the ‘Hungry Forties’, a period that encompassed the catastrophic Irish potato famine, as well as intense suffering for the English working classes. Part of Dickens’ aim as a novelist strongly committed to social reform was to make his comfortable middle-class readers aware of the poverty and degradation around them. Social conditions in Britain in the 1840s were so markedly divided that the novelist and politician Benjamin Disraeli notoriously referred to his country as made up of ‘two nations, the rich and the poor’ in his novel Sybil (1845).

A number of different social concerns occupied Dickens’ attention as he began to conceive of the novella. His friend John Forster believed that a visit to the industrial manufacturing city of Manchester in October 1843 provided the impetus for Dickens to write A Christmas Carol. Among his many commitments in the city, Dickens spoke at a fundraising event for the Manchester Athenaeum, an institution offering educational opportunities to working men. In his speech, Dickens addressed the need to provide education for the poor, suggesting that the right to learn was comparable with the need to eat, asserting at one point, ‘Though he should find it hard for a season even to keep the wolf of hunger from his door let him but once have chased the dragon of ignorance from his hearth’ (in Fielding, p.48).

The connection between education and poverty was certainly a prominent concern for Dickens as he worked on his little Christmas book. There were other issues troubling the author, however. In September, for instance, Dickens had visited a ‘ragged school’ (an institution offering evening classes and religious instruction for those living in extreme poverty) at Field Lane in Holborn. Dickens undertook the visit as a representative of his friend, Angela Burdett Coutts, an extremely wealthy philanthropist who often called on the novelist to advise her at this time.He wrote to Miss Coutts on 16 September in terms that evoke the language and imagery he would soon use so effectively in A Christmas Carol:

On Thursday night, I went to the Ragged School; and an awful sight it is … I have very seldom seen, in all the strange and dreadful things I have seen in London and elsewhere, anything so shocking as the dire neglect of soul and body exhibited in these children. And although I know; and am as sure as it is possible for one to be of anything which has not happened; that in the prodigious misery and ignorance of the swarming masses of mankind in England, the seeds of its certain ruin are sown, I never saw that Truth so staring out in hopeless characters, as it does from the walls of this place. The children in the Jails are almost as common sights to me as my own; but these are worse, for they have not arrived there yet, but are as plainly and certainly travelling there, as they are to their Graves (Letters: 3, 562).

Dickens was obviously horrified by the atrocious conditions in which these children were somehow expected to learn and he saw clearly that no child could be expected to develop into a responsible adult with this kind of start in life. Dickens was equally shocked by two early versions of the parliamentary reports of the Children’s Employment Commission, which he had received in December 1840 and February 1843 respectively. While he had initially pledged to write an article or pamphlet ‘on behalf of the poor man’s child’, promising several times to produce an article for the Edinburgh Review, he later determined to channel his efforts into fiction, rather than a factual account, and A Christmas Carol was born.

Publishing context

A Christmas Carol was something of an experiment for Dickens and he had high hopes for its commercial success. It was the first of his popular Christmas books and it remains, without doubt, Dickens’ best-loved festive tale. Dickens originally produced the story as a rapid way of clearing a debt with his publishers Chapman and Hall. Visually, the novella was stunning and obviously designed to be a Christmas gift. The book was beautifully bound and incorporated colour plates and woodcuts by the artist John Leech. Aesthetically pleasing though the book was, production costs ate into Dickens’ profits. The initial print run of six thousand copies sold out within a matter of days, yet Dickens made only two hundred and thirty pounds from the venture (Schlicke, p.98).