Free Sample Essays > European Literature
A Christmas Carol
The novel ‘A Christmas Carol’ was set at Christmas time in the 19th Century. This was a time of terrible poverty and men who lost their jobs had no money to keep their families living in houses. This sometimes meant to living on the streets, which may have led to death for some. Poverty was lethal. Ebenezer Scrooge who is the main character of the book was a man who had no time or sympathy for people like this “I don’t make idle people merry.” If they would rather die, they had better do so and decrease the surplus population’. He treated people like dirt, especially his employee Bob Cratchit who he thought was below him. He bullied him, payed him peanuts and threatened him with the sack. “You’ll want all day tomorrow I suppose, it’s not convenient and it’s not fair. If I was to stop half a crown for it, you’d think yourself ill-used, ill be bound! A poor excuse for picking a mans pocket every twenty fifth of December”. But Scrooge did not care, it seemed to people that he had no heart or emotion and was a worthless scoundrel. He was a tight fisted, selfish human being and I believe this was because of his childhood. He was really just a victim himself and was lonely and unhappy as a child because of his father leaving him alone at school on Christmas. “The school is not quite deserted, a solitary child neglected by his friends is left there still”. ‘Scrooge said he knew it and sobbed’. Then, when he was older he met a woman named Belle, who became his love interest, but she left him and he replaced her with money and greed. Dickens himself felt poverty and feelings of abandonment when he was a child because he was removed from school and sent to a boot-blacking factory. Dickens considered this period to be the most terrible time in his life. These feelings were unknown to his readers until after his death but these were a heavy influence on his views on social reform and the world he created through his fiction. Gradually as the book nears the end we see a complete turn around in Scrooge. He turned from a nasty, rude man to a wonderful giddy and generous person. “I will honour Christmas in my heart and try to keep it all year. I will live in the Past, the Present and the Future. The spirits of all Three shall strive within me.” This is a change that Scrooge surpasses literally overnight and is just one of the sections of the novel that I will study whether I believe is realistic.
The dictionary definition of the word realism means ‘The practice of regarding things in their true nature and dealing with them as they are’. I believe the word realistic has two meanings and it can either mean believable or true to life. These different meanings may sound quite the same but have different significance [next page]