A Christmas Carol

Ebenezer Scrooge doesn't like Christmas. He doesn't like people. He only likes money. But after spends a very strange Christmas Eve with three ghosts, next morning the once bad Mr. Scrooge wishes everybody a Merry Christmas! Since it was published in 1843, Charles Dickens's celebrated story about the meaning of Christmas has captured the hearts of millions of people all over the world.

Topics for Discussion:
1) Do you believe in ghosts?
2) Would you like to see a ghost and why?


Vocabulary
1) skulls : the bone structures of human or animal heads.
2) sentenced them : told them who were found guilty of a crime what the punishment would be.
3) hanged : suspended by the neck until dead.

Charles Dickens was born in Portsea in 1812, the son of John and Elizabeth Dickens. His father worked for the Navy Pay Office and for several years Charles enjoyed a happy childhood. These happy times did not last and when he was ten years old his family moved to London. His parents always had money problems and they sent Charles to work in a factory when he was twelve years old. He never forgot this humiliation and much of his later writing deals with themes such as the poor and social injustice. Later, he was separated from his parents when they were sent to prison because they couldn't pay back the money which they had borrowed.

At nineteen, he became a newspaper reporter, working for the Mirror of Parliament newspaper where he reported on electoral reforms such as the Reform Bill and the Factory Act. He married Kate Hogarth, the daughter of the chief editor of the Evening Chronicle, and they went on the have ten children.

He began to write sketches – short stories and descriptions of English life – for magazine. Sketches by Boz, published in 1836, was very popular. In the same year his first novel The Pickwick Papers appeared in a magazine every moth, and it soon became a great success. Dickens finished it a year later, when Victoria became queen, and it was the first of many best-selling novels, published in parts every week or month. They include Oliver Twist (1837-8), Nicholas Nickleby (1854), David Copperfield (1849-50), Hard Times (1854), and Great Expectations (1860-1).

But Dickens did lots of other things. In his lifetime he was a magazine editor, an amateur actor, a writer of plays, articles, and hundreds of letters. H also liked traveling, and he lived in Italy (1844-5), Switzerland (1846-7), and in Paris (1847). In 1842 he toured North America, and he returned there in 1867-8 to read his books in public. This was an enormous success, but it was very hard work and he became ill. He died in 1870 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Dickens's books were bestsellers and they are still popular. He always attacked the materialism of Victorian society and tried to show how it caused poverty and other social problems. A Christmas Carol is one example of Dickens's criticism of society and it is also the most famous Christmas story in the world.

Some Information about Charles Dickens

Filmography



Chapter 1 - Scrooge

Chapter 2 - Marley's Ghost

Chapter 3 - The First Spirit

Chapter 4 - The Second Spirit

Chapter 5 - The Last of the Spirit

Chapter 6 - 'A Merry Christmas, Mr. Scrooge!'