In His Book ‘a Christmas Carol’ to What Extent Does Charles Dickens Highlight the Plight of the Working Classes in Victorian England? Essay Example
Charles Dickens was born into a time that saw great changes in the way that people lived their lives.
The majority of the population worked long hours in dangerous factories and workhouses, before going home to filthy and depraved conditions. The wealthy minority lived in comparative luxury.
These differences divided the country and therefore created two different classes in Great Britain.
Dickens was engaged in promoting social change in his novels exploring areas such as punishment and retribution. Social changes came about during his lifetime as more people were made aware of the immorality and social injustice taking place in Victorian England.
In ‘A Christmas Carol’, the author Charles Dickens highlights the plight of the working classes in Victorian England by highlighting a variety of predicaments in which people from the poorer classes found themselves.
Dickens brings out the social conditions of the working classes by describing the situation between Ebenezer Scrooge and his clerk, Bob Cratchit.
In the opening sequence the clerk in his “dismal little cell beyond, a sort of a track” tries to warm himself at a candle with little success. Scrooge’s fire, although it was small, using little of the plentiful fuel he could afford, kept him considerably warmer than his clerk’s mere candle. Dickens used this to illustrate the feeling that the poor were less important than the rich.
The conditions which the working classes lived under are described as “terrible”. However, they would rather die than enter the many workhouses provided by the state.
The attitude Scrooge openly expresses towards the working classes was that they should all be placed in “prisons and workhouses” and he refused to help proclaiming, “it is not my business” when a charitable gentlemen asks him to donate to his charity.
The gentleman explains that there are thousands in need of “common necessaries and common comforts” and that he wishes the workhouses were not in operation,
The majority of the population worked long hours in dangerous factories and workhouses, before going home to filthy and depraved conditions. The wealthy minority lived in comparative luxury.
These differences divided the country and therefore created two different classes in Great Britain.
Dickens was engaged in promoting social change in his novels exploring areas such as punishment and retribution. Social changes came about during his lifetime as more people were made aware of the immorality and social injustice taking place in Victorian England.
In ‘A Christmas Carol’, the author Charles Dickens highlights the plight of the working classes in Victorian England by highlighting a variety of predicaments in which people from the poorer classes found themselves.
Dickens brings out the social conditions of the working classes by describing the situation between Ebenezer Scrooge and his clerk, Bob Cratchit.
In the opening sequence the clerk in his “dismal little cell beyond, a sort of a track” tries to warm himself at a candle with little success. Scrooge’s fire, although it was small, using little of the plentiful fuel he could afford, kept him considerably warmer than his clerk’s mere candle. Dickens used this to illustrate the feeling that the poor were less important than the rich.
The conditions which the working classes lived under are described as “terrible”. However, they would rather die than enter the many workhouses provided by the state.
The attitude Scrooge openly expresses towards the working classes was that they should all be placed in “prisons and workhouses” and he refused to help proclaiming, “it is not my business” when a charitable gentlemen asks him to donate to his charity.
The gentleman explains that there are thousands in need of “common necessaries and common comforts” and that he wishes the workhouses were not in operation,