Character Analysis Of Fred In A Christmas Carol By Charles Dickens

Dickens presents Fred as a cheerful, humble and generous character within the novella as a contrast to Scrooge’s cold and stingy character. As shown in the extract, Fred is ‘Cheerful’ and ‘handsome’ whereas Scrooge is ‘self-contained’ and his features were ‘shrivelled’ by the ‘cold’ (Stave 1).
Fred is the son of Scrooge’s beloved but deceased sister, he is the only living relative and person who wants to pull him out of isolation and back into the world. Dickens was focused on Scrooge’s complicated character in contrast to Fred who did not have much personality and he was not supposed to as Dickens set Fred’s purpose to be Scrooge’s bridge back to human interaction, which, is why Fred and Scrooge contrast so much.
For example, Fred who approached
This can lead us to think about Dickens views on utilitarianism, which was a philosophy famous within the 18th and 19th century, which is the idea that a society should be based on doing the greatest for the majority of people. Utilitarianism many focused on wealth, however, utilitarians believed that the poor were to be blamed for being poor and that happiness was mostly based around money and health. Dickens strongly disagrees with this and it can be represented as Scrooge being a miserable person yet having huge amounts of money and Fred being a poor person yet being happy and ‘cheerful’. This clearly shows that Dickens believed that happiness is not measured with ‘money’, which can lead us to think that what Dickens really symbolises by using Fred as a character is that human interaction, satisfaction with what one has and family relations are the only ways that humans could possibly be happy.
This can be shown within stave 5 when Scrooge decided to attend Fred’s dinner party when he asks ‘will you let me in, Fred?’ and Fred cheerfully responds with “let him in”. Fred is shown to be very happy when Scrooge finally decides to join his dinner party. The use of frequent short sentences after that can show how overwhelming the feeling of happiness could be and the cause was scrooge being around and interacting with others, this supports my
Therefore, Fred’s contradictory personality to Scrooge plays a vital role in representing the gap within society. Dickens purposefully made the two polar opposites to represent how big of a ‘gap’ there was between the rich and the poor therefore helping Dickens make the audience feel ‘The sledge hammer blow’ he was directing at society at the time the book was published, Dickens may have purposefully published the book a year after laws were released limiting the amount of hours a child labourers were forced to work. Dickens was a child labourer himself and he started when he was 12, his passion to show the gap within society using Scrooge and Fred might have been because he wasn’t exactly satisfied with the laws and he wanted to change the way people of higher ranks viewed the