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GCSE Grade 9 ‘A Christmas Carol’(summary,key quotes,analysis)
AQA GCSE A christmas carol themes revision
An essay plan on how Dickens uses Christmas to convey the Christian message of forgiveness and redemption.
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A Christmas Carol essay
Question: How does Dickens portray Scrooge’s fear within “A Christmas Carol”
Paragraph 1/5 (Intro)
In the novella, Dickens makes it a priority to display Scrooges fears so that we, as readers truly
understand the character so that we are able to follow his redemption arc carefully and understand
step by step how he changes, “Scrooge feared the silent shape so much that his legs trembled
beneath him” shows us how weak Scrooge can actually be, he portrays himself as this emotionless,
careless for all but money figure, but when he is face to face with the ghost of Christmas yet to
come, who is a metaphor for the grim reaper which is a metaphor for death, he is scared so much
that “his legs trembled beneath him”. In addition to this, I and I’m sure many other readers also find
this quite ironic in the sense that in this time, poor people face the pain of death on a daily basis,
they are literally surrounded by pain and suffering caused by death, and yet they live on, an example
of this is Bob Cratchit, his son is faced by death on a daily basis and yet he lives on, he puts on a front
of happiness in front of his family, but when Scrooge sees a glimpse of death, he trembles in fear. I
believe Dickens did this in order to show the hypocritical thinking of Scrooge, he expects the poor to
just in a way “man up” to death and they should simply work harder to avoid it, and yet when
confronted by death himself he is petrified.
Another way Dickens shows fear within the novella is at the end of the play, where the two
characters Ignorance and Want are introduced, Scrooge “startled back, appalled” when seeing these
two characters, he is genuinely horrified of these two characters and what they symbolise. Ignorance
is portrayed to the readers as symbolism of the rich at the time and want portrays the need for
support for the poor. Even in this short quote from the novella, we get a glance of Scrooge being
ignorant, the word “appalled” shows how Scrooge still refuses to believe that these creatures that
symbolise ignorance and want, even exist which truly shows the readers of our modern era that the
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