hello everybody welcome to today's video about a Christmas carol spoiler alert what I go through the video assumes you know the entire text so don't watch it unless you do or unless you don't mind having the plot spoil for you so what I want to do today is talk about some of the more sophisticated points for analysis in A Christmas Carol having completed GCSEs a levels and a degree in English literature I've always thought it's interesting how a book like a Christmas carol is only a GCSE text it's rarely studied anywhere beyond GCSE at a level or degree level and I think a lot of that is to do with the fact that it's short it takes about two two and a half hours to read and it's sometimes thought of as a very simple allegorical tale and almost pantomime like villain learns the message of social responsibility and the transformation he goes through is so kind of over the top not very believable you know he's a absolute hardest Flint tough guy at the beginning but within minutes of seeing his childhood self he's crying his eyes out and he's totally changed perhaps not very believable and often thought of as a very simple story but there are some complexities to the text that are worth exploring so that's what I'm going to look at in this video it's a bit of a longer video I do have a playlist of videos on a Christmas Carol make sure you watch those ones those are shorter but let's get into it the first thing I want to think about is the character of Ebenezer Scrooge himself so at the beginning of the text we meet and out-and-out villain he doesn't want to give money to charity he doesn't want to put coal on the fire he doesn't want to spend Christmas with his nephew he's just in every conceivable way a sort of horrible character and structurally this is very important as well because Dickens decides to present him it this way very early in the text so this structural decision to write off his character is overwhelmingly negative at the beginning of the text is there to kind of make us be very aware this is a bad character of course this is very similar to the character of mr. Birling in an inspector calls if you watched my top set analysis of that last week a bad guy presented as being very bad very early on at the text now this lends itself to a very simple analysis so we can look at descriptions like this one on the screen and we can say you know well look at this kind of overwhelmingly long sentence a squeezing wrenching grasping scraping clutching covetous old sinner and we can say this you know overwhelming sentence structure overwhelms us with the negative impression of the character we've got the colorimetry for example in the quotation that made his eyes red the the color imagery of red being associated with evil and all of this kind of thing that is a very very simple level of analysis so you know I think it's very easy to think of Scrooge as an out about bad guy at the beginning and this kind of almost pantomime villain which makes his transformation at the end even more dramatic I will give it that but one of the many paradoxes of the text is Dickens's obvious pleasure in thinking of sarcastic hilarious dialogue for his main character so one of the lines for example every idiot who goes about with Merry Christmas on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of Holly through his heart this is one of the funniest lines in the text and most of the funny lines are given to the character of Scrooge so that's quite an interesting thing to think about why give your funniest lines to the character who is supposedly the villain and of course the reason or maybe not of course but I think one of the reasons is because the reader needs to like Scrooge in some way we need to be drawn to him if we're not we're not going to care for or be invested in the transformation he goes through in the text see the message Scrooge learns is one that we as a reader are also supposed to learn and if we think he's nothing but an evil bad guy and a villain we won't stop to think about how the message could also apply to us it's something we also see in months back for those of you studying that text things like the murder of Duncan occurring offstage because it would be very difficult if not impossible for the audience to have a shred of sympathy for Macbeth if they were to witness the actual act on stage so the humor related to the character of Scrooge the dialogue he gives which is often very very funny very witty very quick a lot of banter is one of the things or maybe the only thing that keeps him likeable at the beginning of the text and that's to make sure the message of the text is not lost on us and that in itself is quite an interesting point is there a message for every reader to learn is it not just a message for a certain type of person and I think this is something we can look at in a number of ways I'm not saying there's a right or wrong answer here but it's interesting when Scrooge meets Jacob Marley the his old business partner and Marley says that he has to for eternity drag the chain of his sins and he begs that Scrooge quote shun the path I tread and we realized at this moment that this is not just about one man ever knees a Scrooge but is about a certain type of man we have Marley was the same type of man what type of man well certainly we can say a man who believes in Malthusian economic theory so let's talk a little bit about context now you have to be careful with context because it's not just about writing about what was going on at the time in fact it's not about that at all it's just understanding how the context influences the the text itself so Dickens wrote a Christmas carol at what is now considered to be the end of the Industrial Revolution a period when Britain's changed to new manufacturing processes to machines that required fewer workers to steam trains to water power resulting in lots of positives the country rising to a position of one of the world's economic superpowers and Dickens was fascinated by all of this but he was less in pressed by the darker crueler effects of this social and economic transformation and that is the inequality that it created or exacerbated or entrenched in society there was a widespread feeling at the time that Dickens was writing that poor people were poor because they were lazy or immoral and that helping them would only encourage this laziness if they were going to be helped it should be under conditions as awful as possible to discourage people from seeking that help so we know about the work houses families were split up there wasn't much food the work was paying for as Scrooge says early in the text those who are badly off must go there and there are more details on that in my guide to a Christmas carol available in paperback on Amazon or ebook at mr. broth calm but associated with this concept then were the ideas of this man Thomas Malthus who cautioned against intervening when people were hungry because he felt it would only lead to an impossible to manage population size he wrote about surplus population a surplus population which is really important this phrase surplus population because this is how we see that scrooge is a representation of Matthews Ian's economic theory because he talks about Scrooge does in the book and that you know if people starve it'll be good at the beginning of the book when he's talking to those who want the charity donation he says well it would be good if poor people starve because it will quote decrease the surplus population so we can see the book as a direct criticism of Matthew's an economic theory and in my guide to GCSE English literature which again is available in paperback on Amazon eBook at Mr brough com there's a great essay about this and that a student wrote it and sent it to be included in the book but I think we can take it further than this this sort of simplistic message of social responsibility the rich should look after the pool that kind of thing there's more to it than that because if that's the message then this message is only for a certain group of people it's only for the middle and upper class who don't look after the lower class of working class and I think there is more to it than that this guy here is John Forster he was Dick as his friend and first biographer and he wrote there was indeed nobody that had not son interest in the message of the Christmas Carol it told The Selfish man to rid himself of selfishness the just man to make himself generous and the good-natured man to enlarge the sphere of his good nature so there's a message for everybody to learn and I think that is you know something that is important in this text but that message that we're learning isn't always easy to understand them there's something that I can't quite get my head around in this book and I thought I'd throw it open to you guys who are watching this video perhaps if you're watching it in class you might have a discussion on this in your lesson or even if you're watching it at home have a think about it and leave a comment in the comment section what you think about this the ghost of Christmas present take Scrooge to see the cratchits and their Christmas celebration and it is such a positive celebration these are four different quotations from that sort of section of the book there never was such a goose Bob said he didn't believe there ever was such a goose cooked its tenderness and flavor size and cheapness with the themes of universal admiration eked out by applesauce and mashed potatoes it was a sufficient dinner for the whole family indeed as mrs. Cratchit said with great delight surveying one small atom of a bone upon the dish they hadn't ate it all at last so in this quotation we see that there is barely enough food okay so they have to eat out with mashed potatoes and applesauce and then it's just sufficient it's just about enough food and the second one everybody had something to say about it but nobody said or thought it was at all a small pudding for a large family it would have been a flat heresy to do so any Cratchit would have blushed to hint at such a thing so in this quotation was shown that the pudding is very small nobody wants to acknowledge it nobody wants to moan about it but you know essentially they're poor there isn't a great deal of food for the they're having to add to their food and mashed potatoes to make it stretch to a just about reasonable size portion they're having to kind of overlook the fact that the pudding is very small Bob Cratchit's elbow stood the family display of glass two tumblers and a custard cup without a handle another sign of their poverty the fact that they don't have much glass at all and yet the final quotation is a real kind of summary of their attitude there was nothing of high mark in this they were not a handsome family they were not well dressed their shoes were far from being waterproof their clothes were scanty and Peter might have known and very likely did the inside of a pawnbrokers but they were happy grateful pleased with another and contented with the time now this is so interesting okay because all through the book it seems like the message is essentially look if you are rich you should be looking after those who are poor and yet here we have a very poor family but they're very happy family okay so Christmas at the cratchits might at first strike us is overly sentimental and there was an editor of the one of the editions of a Christmas carol who wrote this Dickens can cut a poor family who are almost wholly untouched by the degrading effects of poverty and that's exactly it the warmth and Cheer of their celebrations despite a lack of food despite the fact that the gifts like master Peters present is a hand-me-down shirt of his father's makes us wonder just what we're supposed to feel sorry about for this very happy poor family in contrast screws with all his money eats a melancholy dinner in the opening pages of the book so that's my question to you as we finish this video what is the meaning of the crutch it's happiness because Scrooge's transformed behavior in the books final track chapter is marked by his desire to enrich the lives of others through giving his first act upon waking up on Christmas morning is to send a turkey to Bob's house and later he gives Bob a pay-rise but seems through the quotations here on the screen that this doesn't quite make sense the crutches are very happy they're probably the happiest people in the entire book and they're happy without money so why does Scrooge give it to them I want you to tell me in the comment section what you think this happiness in the poor family is suggesting because is it just as simple as you know the the poor are suffering and the rich should help them well I don't think it is because the poorest family in the book are very very happy in their poverty what is the message behind that I hope you found this video useful please do subscribe to the channel