Top 3 Literary Themes in A Christmas Carol for Exam Success

three ideas in A Christmas Carol which are going to help you get the top grades I'm going to try and do it without a

single edit just to show you how easy these ideas are to apply number one we have the idea of fatherhood this is why

it's so important to the Ghost of Christmas Past to take Scrooge back to his childhood to show the reader that

your upbringing determines your to life Scrooge is trapped as an isolated and lonely child at school and he replicates

that he reproduces it in his later life we can see all his later life up until the ghosts appearing as being a

recreation of his childhood isolation every time he gets close to fezy wig to Fan

to Marley he always picks people who are going to die and disappear he is going to be abandoned in life and eventually

he seeks out that abandonment ruining his relationship with bell but the end of the novel returns us to the idea of

fatherhood and Dickens deliberately says that he became a new father to Tiny Tim so what's the turning point in a novel

that leads to that transformation of being the fatherless child who's abandoned by his own father who then

abandons relationships with other people in his adult life to deliberately choosing relationships and in particular

becoming a father well there were two moments the Ghost of Christmas Past takes him back to a moment where bell is

with her husband but more particularly with her daughter who is about 16 at the time and Scrooge focuses not on Bell he

focuses on the daughter the daughter who could have eased the Autumn of his years it's becoming a father that he realized

is what's missing in his life then the Ghost of Christmas present takes him to see the cratchet family

Christmas and he sees Tiny Tim so the transformation is when he asks that ghost is Tiny Tim going to survive and

the Ghost says no this is extraordinary isn't it because this is the Ghost of Christmas present it's the middle of the

novel but that's the moment when he changes Scrooge is often seen as changing when he gets to the Ghost of

Christmas future who uh or of things Yet to Come who shows him his grave and he shows him people being disrespectful of

his dead body and it's the momento Mory idea this fear of death that makes him change but I don't think that's the

right reading of the novel his change happens when he realizes that he has the responsibility of a father when he is an

employer and he can become that second father to Tiny Tim which is why the novel ends as it does okay so I've got

the theme of fatherhood that takes me from the beginning to the end whenever I go from beginning to end I'm always

offering at least a thoughtful response and probably a convincing and conceptualized one that's why it shoves

me up into the top grades right our next theme ignorance and want if you think about the events

of the novel if ignorance and want don't appear the whole novel is exactly the same Scrooge transforms exactly the same

the power of Christmas is reinforced exactly the same the power of Charity love of your fellow man all that stuff

still stands and so Dickens introduces them for another reason interestingly every other novel Dickens wrote except

this one he kind of got paid by the word because he serialized them so he had to get to X number of thousand words by the

end of the week Bosch publish that and I get paid well this was different he wrote this in only about 4 weeks and he

did it all in one go then published it as a complete book so any extra words are lost income he's got to pay for the

printing any extra words are redundant so he puts these characters in deliberately why because he is obsessed

with two things number one poverty and Revolution number two education and revolution ution let me explain so just

before he wrote this book he had this idea of writing a political pamphlet about the problems of Childhood

Education Childhood poverty and children being made to work luckily for us he was strapped for cash and he needed to make

some quick money so this is around November time and he thinks right okay people spend a lot of Christmas I'm

going to write a Christmas book yeah so he writes this book primarily just to make Mone money but he also wants to

deliver this political message about poverty and education and so he puts that into the book this is where

ignorance and want come in so he introduces the idea of poverty as a danger to society You' be familiar with

the malthusian idea that the poor are a burden on society because they eat up resources and so you know that's all the

conversation he has about um the poor rather dying than go to the workhouse well fine let them go and do it then

that's what all that's about but dickins takes a different perspective he says look if we create a society which is

poor they're not just going to use up resources that we need they're actually going to rise up against us and this is

what happens only 5 years later across Europe in 1848 there revolutions all over the place

Europe had already seen a massive revolution in France with all the aristocracy being executed and this idea

that Revolution would come to Britain was something that he was really really interested in now want poverty is not

the worst of the two it is ignorance that's the worst of the two that's the boy with doom written across his head

the point here Dickens is saying is look if you if you educate the poor then they will be able to get jobs and earn money

and stop being poor and in that way Society will improve but if you don't educate the poor then what other

recourse will they have accept violence well actually very little you know if jobs aren't paying them enough and

they're not educated enough to get better jobs then they're obviously going to turn to crime and violence to make

ends meat to survive and so so this is a plea for educating the poor that of course is a big deal in the 1800s where

literacy levels are rising dramatically and also dickens's livelihood depends on that doesn't it the more people who can

read the more people who buy his books the better off he'll be but it's not just self-interest he wants to change

society for the better by educating everyone to make them literate now this is particularly relevant to him and it

brings us back also conveniently to the idea of fatherhood so when Dickens was 12 his

father was arrested for having too many debts and the way the prison system worked then is that you were sent to

jail not as a punishment um for a crime that you've committed you were sent there until you could pay off those

debts and how did that work well his family had to move in with him yeah so Dickens brothers and sisters and his mom

had to move into this deta jail with his dad but not Dickens because Dickens was 12 years old he was now old enough to

work and he was sent away to work in a tanning Factory hard labor with disgusting tar and working with leather

disgusting conditions and he wasn't allowed to live with the family he had to take lodgings so he basically earned

the money to pay off his father's debts obviously he didn't pay them all off there are other sources of income but he

was sent to work because of the father that he had and he was snatched away from his family snatched out of school

and forced to work in these disgusting conditions in order to pay his father's debts so Dickens has got daddy issues at

the time that he's writing in 1843 his dad is coming back to his famous author son and asking for money

so the idea of fatherhood and poverty are completely linked in dickens's mind and Dickens has also in his own mind

raised himself up out of poverty by refusing to stay in these factory conditions he got himself an education

and he became a court reporter then a writer education saved Charles Dickens and he wants education to save all the

other kids like him who are everywhere in society because they don't have a school system as we've got he's

campaigning to get a school system that will educate the population so that they can enjoy success as he

has another little nuggety detail here is that the cratchet family home in Cen town is the family home that Charles

Dickens was in when he was dragged out of it and his family were dragged out of it because of his father's

um debt so it's actually the same house which he describes in the same place he deliberately places his own house in the

novel because psychologically that is what he's writing about his own journey into

poverty and then out of it through education that's why ignorance and want appear in the novel you probably haven't

been taught that which is a guarantee that writing about this is going to distinguish your writing from hundreds

of thousands of other um students in the exam and you're going to get the grade that you want which brings us to number

three it's very easy to see the themes of A Christmas Carol as Charity Christmas love respect for your fellow

man all these things that easily trip off the tongue but what's often not considered is the role of the employer

so let's consider that role Scrooge is an employer and the key thing that begins and ends the novel is

his role as an employer at the beginning remember he's only using one bit of coal poor old Bob cratchet has to work

Christmas Eve and then Scrooge complains that oh I suppose you want me to pay for your Christmas day do you taking all my

money you SAS so that's his role as an employer there then we get get to the end and he gets Bob crater and says I'm

going to increase your wages so Dickens is obsessed with scrooges not just his generosity but his role as an

employer then we have fezy wig introduced who we find out made everybody's lives happy not by spending

loads of money on them but by giving them care and love and a sense of family while they worked for him that's the

point of the fezy wig CHR party so Scrooge has seen what a good employer looks like guess what it looks a lot

like a good father that's the kind of figure that fezy wig and his wife represent husband and wife father and

mother team to their apprentices when we get to the end Scrooge as we've seen also becomes a

better father at the same time as becoming a better employer why because Shake not Shakespeare Dickens wants to

show us that being a better employer is like being a better father let's dig even deeper to some more characters who

nobody writes about they are the charwoman the laund dress The Undertaker's man and Joe the receiver of

stolen goods so let's start with Joe he is described as about 70 and he's living in this H where the door into what he

calls his parlor or his best room is actually a ragged curtain he clearly lives in poverty and he's still having

to fence stolen goods at the age of 70 dickens's message crime does not pay it's not a moral message it's a

financial message these are poor people who are trying to make ends meet and even tur into crime isn't enough now

let's consider the childom and the laundress and the Undertaker's man these are people with jobs who are paid so

little by the employers that they have to go out and steal just to get a proper income this is Dickens very clever

message he's telling his readers that middleclass and Wealthy victorians are employing loads of people in the course

of their day you know they don't have washing machines they have a washing machine they have a washer woman they

don't have um ways of cleaning the house because you know the wife doesn't want to do

that they get a childom to come in and clean the house for them there are loads and loads of these jobs grocery delivery

people Milkman who depend on the wages that people pay Dick's point is you don't pay enough dear reader we as a

soci Society don't pay enough so the poor stay poor and in order to make ends meat loads of them will naturally turn

to crime and that's why when Scrooge goes to visit them negotiating how much money they'll get for stuff they've

stolen off him they behave in really polite ways they're really careful of what they say to each other they don't

want to hurt each other's feelings no you go first no you get the best price they are nice people doing

horrible things because they have been kept poor which brings us to the obsession with Bob cratchet and him

being paid 15 Bob 15 Shillings Dickens is making a really profound Point Scrooge Who is this awful Miser we're

supposed to hate through a lot of the novel even though there's a lot of humor so we enjoy his company but we're

supposed to hugely disapprove of him even even though he's this terrible um hate figure he's actually paying Bob the

going wage that is dickens's final joke this horrible Miser who we've spent most of the novel disapproving of is paying

exactly the same as all the other employers Bob doesn't just walk off and do another job does he which is what you

and I would do and what Bob would have done in the real Victorian period the he doesn't do that is he's not going to get

a better deal anywhere else he's got a secure job with Scrooge on a fair wage of course Dickens point is that's

completely unfair it's just deemed fair by Society because those with money exploit those without and that is why

it's so important at the end of the stve five that Dickens make sure Scrooge raises the wages for Bob cratchet

through three topics that other people won't be writing about that will give you grade seven if you do it badly grade

eight and N if you do it well you'll notice that I've not really introduced any quotes that's not just because I

want to do this in one take is because you don't actually need to quote you just have to refer to incidents and what

is said the examiners will give you the marks for it replay the video see how I did it wipe it in your essay it's not

plagiarism good luck if you want to see the grade n essay on ins spectacles or MC Beth what am I doing damn it I wish I

could have edited this video there's going to be a grade n essay that I think you should watch right

now