A Christmas Carole

In this assignment, I am going to describe the Victorian England living conditions. I will then look at Scrooges character in chapter one and compare this with his nephews charter. Next I will analyse how Dickens uses narrative techniques in the opening chapter to hook the reader. Lastly I will look at the supernatural side of the novel and explain how this has a effect on scrooge. In conclusion I will explore the reason why Dickens wrote the novel.
In   Victorian England the air around London was heavily polluted by industrial smoke and factory pollution. The smog made the city a very dark and unhealthy place to live in. http://www.hidenlives.org.uk/articles/poverty-4.html. At this period of time there was very little state pension and no safety net to ensure everyone a minimum standard of welfare. There were many cases of death caused by starvation and destitution. In 1850 an inquest was held on a 38 year old man whose body was reported as being more than a skeleton, his wife was described as being the very personification of want and her child as a skeleton infant. (The Times, 20th November 1850). The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 ensured that no abled body person could get poor relief unless they went to the special workhouses. Families were split up and punished if they spoke to each other and many children were sold to work in coal mines and factories with dangerous machinery. These statements showed how dark dim and gloomy it was in those days. I can imagine how bitter cold it was when breathing in the dirty dreary fog. As Dickens states in the novel It was cold, bleak bitter weather; foggy withal........... Wheezing up and down. The city clocks had just gone three, but it was dark already.
Dickens is very good at capturing the reader particularly in the first chapter. He starts off with Marley was dead. Straight away you want to know what, when how did this happen. When describing scrooge he uses a lot of metaphors to describe Scrooge for example   Hard...