![]() ![]() ‘A Christmas Carol’ is set against a grim background of Victorian poverty. The story’s very opening sentence, ‘Marley was dead, to begin with’ insists on a subversion and upending of norms that will persist throughout the book, driving its reader in circles of speculation and uncertainty. We open in a tiny, freezing office, filthy sleet piled up against the door travel through Victorian London’s smoggy streets to a mean little house and the stub of a candle, and in it, a man who seems to embody everything about the unyielding, relentlessly striving capitalist spirit of his time - and all this, with astonishing suddenness, is supplanted by ghostly visitations, weird spirits, the picket fences of the countryside, children’s games, and one genial Christmas party after another. ![]() In Dickens’s curious novella, the miraculous is grounded firmly in gritty, high-Victorian realism wildly discordant elements jangle alongside each other throughout. 12 Essential English Novels Everyone Should ReadĪdam and Eve, Hercules, Hansel and Gretel, the Prodigal Son - other stories of the same qualities as A Christmas Carol come from and are set in a lost, dreamlike, past, where horses grow human heads, a glance from a monster’s eye can freeze a man in stone, seas part to let men through and the whole world can flood over. ![]() How Christmas Shows Us the Rapid Change in the Values of Our Society ![]()
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