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Learning Objective : To REVISE contextual knowledge of the novel.

Learning Objective : To REVISE contextual knowledge of the novel. Learning Outcome : To EVALUATE how the context of the novel influences the characters and events of Stave 1. Get your whiteboards ready!.

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Learning Objective : To REVISE contextual knowledge of the novel.

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  1. Learning Objective: To REVISE contextual knowledge of the novel. Learning Outcome: To EVALUATE how the context of the novel influences the characters and events of Stave 1.

  2. Get your whiteboards ready! A Christmas Carol is a novella by Charles Dickens first published on December 19, 1843.

  3. Get your whiteboards ready! The story was an instant success, selling over six thousand copies in one week.

  4. Get your whiteboards ready! • A Christmas Carol was written during a time of decline in the old Christmas traditions.

  5. Get your whiteboards ready! It is set in Elizabethan times.

  6. In a nutshell… • A Christmas Carol is a Victorian morality tale of an old and bitter miser, Ebenezer Scrooge, who undergoes a profound experience of redemption over the course of one night. • Mr. Scrooge is a financier/money-changer who has devoted his life to the accumulation of wealth. He holds anything other than money in contempt, including friendship, love and the Christmas season.

  7. The New Poor Laws • The New Poor Laws made a series of 22 recommendations which were to form the basis of the new legislation that followed in the same year. Its main legislative proposal was that: • ‘Except as to medical attendance, and subject to the exception respecting apprenticeship herein after stated, all relief whatever to able-bodied persons or to their families, otherwise than in well-regulated workhouses (i.e. places where they may be set to work according to the spirit and intention of the 43d of Elizabeth) shall be declared unlawful, and shall cease, in manner and at periods hereafter specified; and that all relief afforded in respect of children under the age of 16 shall be considered as afforded to their parents.’ • In addition, it recommended that workhouse conditions should be 'less eligible' (less desirable) than those of an independent labourer of the lowest class • The report also revived the workhouse test — the belief that the deserving and the undeserving poor could be distinguished by a simple test: anyone prepared to accept relief in the repellent workhouse must be lacking the moral determination to survive outside it.

  8. Early Nineteenth-Century London • London was a world city that awed visitors with its size and its squalor, its grandeur and its filth. • Victorian London was the largest, most spectacular city in the world. • In 1800 the population of London was around a million souls. That number would swell to 4.5 million by 1880.

  9. Did you know.. • In his excellent biography, Dickens, Peter Ackroyd notes that "If a late twentieth-century person were suddenly to find himself in a tavern or house of the period, he would be literally sick - sick with the smells, sick with the food, sick with the atmosphere around him".

  10. Rich and poor people lived very close to each other because the city was crammed with people. • Thousands of horse-drawn vehicles clutter the roads and street sweepers have tons of manure to clean up.

  11. Many houses burned coal for heat and cooking and this means the air is always full of soot. • Raw sewage flows through open drains in the streets into the river. • Pick-pockets, prostitutes, drunks, beggars, and vagabonds fill the streets.

  12. People don’t wash a lot. They don’t wash their clothes. The smell is unbearable. • At night main streets are lit by gas lamps. Side streets and alleys are not lit at all. • Many houses are lit by candles or a small gas lamp.

  13. People drank water out of the Thames. The same river into which the sewage ran. • Many people caught cholera and the whole city stunk, until 1875 when proper sewers were built. • In wet weather straw was scattered in walkways, storefronts, and in carriages to try to soak up the mud and wet.

  14. Before 1834 the church was responsible for the poor. • After this workhouses were built. Many families worked and lived here. It was very badly paid with long hours and a high chance of disease and death.

  15. Dickens and the New Poor Laws • Upon Fred’s departure, one of A Christmas Carol’s greatest concerns is bought to light: poverty and inequality • Bob Cratchit admits (lets in) ‘the portly gentlemen’ who are collecting to provide some Christmas cheer for the destitute • Scrooge demands ‘Are their no prisons?’ (p.38) • Dickens uses Scrooge as a mouthpiece to expose the brutality of interning paupers in a workhouse, rather an than providing for them in a compassionate manner • Scrooge’s outright refusal of aid is described to shock readers out of their inertia – it is not enough to just read passively, but it is important for Dickens to have an impact on his readers for change to occur in society. Remaining inert will results in terrible consequences for society. Poor people Apathy, inaction, disinterest

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