insight text guide
Grace Moore
A Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens
Copyright © Insight Publications
First published in 2011, reprinted in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016.
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National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Moore, Grace, 1974-
Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol / Grace Moore.
9781921411915 (pbk.)
Secondary school age.
Dickens, Charles, 1812–1870 Christmas carol.
Christmas stories, English—History and criticism.
English literature—Study and teaching.
823.8
Other ISBNs:
9781925134995 (digital)
9781925175325 (bundle: print + digital)
Cover design: The Modern Art Production Group
Printed in Australia.
contents
CHARACTER MAP
OVERVIEW
About the author
Charles John Huffam Dickens was born in Portsmouth, England in 1812. His father, John Dickens, worked as a pay clerk for the royal navy, although his personal finances were rather fraught. John Dickens was known as a generous, convivial man, but he struggled with debt for much of his adult life and in 1824 he was imprisoned in the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison.
Charles Dickens was only twelve years old at the time of his father’s arrest and was sent to work at Warren’s Blacking Factory, where he was employed to fix labels onto bottles of boot blacking. A deeply sensitive young man, Dickens found the experience to be both threatening and degrading, and he seems never to have truly recovered. John Dickens secured his release from the Marshalsea Prison in May 1824, but his son continued to work at the blacking factory until the father argued with the owner, several weeks later. The trauma of this sudden descent from a middle-class childhood to the world of work never left Dickens, although in his lifetime he confided only in his friend, John Forster, who eventually became his biographer. Dickens never forgave his mother for her eagerness to patch up the quarrel with the factory owners and send her son back to work.
This brief taste of poverty undoubtedly shaped the rest of Dickens’ life. It provided him with a remarkable drive to succeed, but it also gave him insight into the miseries of the urban underclass and particularly the sufferings of poor children. Dickens returned to school for a brief spell, but was then apprenticed as a clerk to a firm of solicitors. Not finding the legal profession to be stimulating, he went on to work as a parliamentary reporter, regularly writing up accounts of debates (including those surrounding child labour) for newspapers.
Bubbling over with ambition and energy, Dickens also began to write short fictional sketches and submitted one of these to the Monthly Magazine in 1832. The piece was not only accepted, its author was commissioned to produce more and these short works were eventually collected as Sketches by Boz. In 1836, Dickens was approached by the publishers Chapman and Hall to provide the text for a set of sporting illustrations by the artist Robert Seymour. As Dickens gained more