How seriously do you take Dickens' social critique in Christmas Carol?
- I think you can argue his portrayal of the poor is sentimentalised. The Cratchits and the other folk enjoying Christmas in their own little ways are hardly a searching portrayal of Vict. social ills.
1/
Of the actual underclass -- the unskilled, unemployed, unhoused -- we see hardly anything, although perhaps we are not at "peak slum" in the 1840s.
2/
Dickens' message in the text seems to be: the answer to society's problems is for rich people to be nicer.
Perhaps this was more revolutionary in the 1840s than it seems now? ACC isn't interested in "inequality" in any structural sense.
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Related: as a marker I've seen the term "socialist" bleed through from AIC into answers on ACC. Best to avoid this I think.
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Or: am I missing something?
Perhaps in Victorian literature sentimentality is not antithetical to making a serious statement?
Or is this *knowingly* sentimental and soft-focus work, written by a serious but commercially minded writer?
5/
Really interested to hear ideas on this 🙂
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