A Christmas Carol- Part 2
Charles Dickens could have written a journalist pamphlet instead of the fictionalized story of A Christmas Carol, but he didn't. During the Christmas season, he wanted to show the people in London during the Victorian era the poverty and economic disparities between the haves and have-nots. While writing The Christmas Carol, Dickens walked the streets of London for hours observing the living conditions of the impoverished. His keen eye allowed him to write from the heart the life experiences of people living poorly because of bad government policies.
With the art of storytelling, Charles Dickens shows the poverty of the people, especially the issue of starvation, with descriptive language and sensory details. According to Tara Moore's article, Starvation in Victorian Christmas Fiction, "Ebenezer Scrooge faces the poverty of his employee Bob Cratchit's family when the Ghost of Christmas Present visits him.
Charles Dickens continues to show the reader the real-life experiences of a middle-class family at Christmas. According to Moore, “The Cratchits' humble Christmas meal places the family firmly within an English identity but shows that they are on the border of poverty and, thus, starvation. A Christmas Carol, being hungry at Christmas could jeopardize not just an individual's class status but their very Englishness."
Moore Continues:
The Christmas menu acts as a test, and Mrs. Cratchit and her child assistants feel the stress of being up to the mark on their performance as cooks of the Christmas dinner. The small goose passes the test since "one small atom of a bone" remains on the plate, and the whole family vocally assesses the small plum pudding. Imagine a Christmas inspector checking off each of the standard dishes, noting at the bottom of the evaluation that the Cratchits had only the minimum amount. The Christmas reader has been taught to evaluate the festive board. Dicken's narrator circuitously expresses what "any Cratchit would have blushed to say": that was "a small pudding for a large family" (Dickens, Christmas Carol 88-89; Ch. 3). The narrator plays the role of the Christmas inspector by noting the lack of food, and while Mrs. Cratchit might find relief in the fact that her meal has passed middle-class muster, the narrator's sympathetic candor leaves room for readers to doubt the meal's total success as a marker of class identity. Moreover, the fuss made over a few leftover morsels suggests that this is an uncommon event at the Cratchit table, where some of the family must often go hungry. Nonetheless, the holiday meal qualifies as far as the Cratchits are concerned, and they congratulate themselves on their presumed station in the English middle-class celebration of the holiday.
According to Moore,
Scrooge's room turns into the most memorable display of Christmas food. The piles of foodstuff that meet Scrooge's eye when he encounters the Ghost of Christmas Present do not reflect the international flavor so often found in depictions of the twentieth-century Santa Claus but rather emphasize an English food market: "Heaped up upon the floor, form a kind of throne, were turkey, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch, that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam. (Dickens, A Christmas Carol 79: Ch. 3) Two children named Ignorance and Want are concealed beneath the spirit's robes. This symbolizes the lie of Victorian society that Dickens fought to expose: starvation and poverty concealed just beneath the patina of English middle-class institutions.
Moore, Tara. “Starvation in Victorian Christmas Fiction.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 36, no. 2, 2008, pp. 489–505. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40347201. Accessed 10 Dec. 2023.
Dickens uses food with Scrooge's conversion. The first thing Scrooge does as a changed man is buy the largest turkey in the shop to show his generosity and goodwill toward his fellow man.
This type of writing stirs the reader's emotions and helps to digest the complex realities of what greed and bitterness can do to a single soul, a city, or a nation. Depicting starvation of the people in London brought feelings of fear and dread of how close starvation could come to those in the middle class. Showing starvation also arouses the emotion of anger and the questions of why the children are starving and what can be done to stop it.
Not only are our emotions stirred when listening to or reading a story, but scientists are discovering that chemicals are released in our brains. In her article, The Science Behind the Art of Storytelling, Lani Peterson writes, "Chemicals like cortisol, dopamine, and oxytocin are released in the brain when we're told a story. Why does that matter? If we are trying to make a point stick, cortisol assists with our formulating memories. Dopamine, which helps regulate our emotional responses, keeps us engaged. When creating deeper connections with others, oxytocin is associated with empathy, an important element in building, deepening or maintaining good relationships."
https://www.harvardbusiness.org/the-science-behind-the-art-of-storytelling/
Of course, Charles Dickens didn't have this knowledge of cortisol, dopamine, and oxytocin, but he did have his experiences of how his writing affected people. Intuitively, he knew writing a story with believable characters and the truth about starvation in the Victorian Era would be brought to the forefront of people's minds. To this day, A Christmas Carol is one of the most beloved stories of our time, yet one of the weightiest stories because the story hits all the right notes. He drives home the consequences of greed with the fear of starvation in the present and the fear of our consequences in the afterlife due to our choices. His story still causes people to examine their hearts and minds.
Storytelling, at its best, will bring people to think deeply and consider ways to change the circumstances in which they find themselves. Charles Dickens accomplished all that with a story instead of a pamphlet.