Memorable literary works, their origins and characters
A Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
British writer. Born in Portsmouth, died in Gad's Hill, Kent. His father was imprisoned for debt as a result of badly mismanaging his finances. Dickens was taken out of school and sent to work in a blacking warehouse. He was forced, by his mother, to continue working even after his father's release from prison. This bitter experience, born of a sense of abandonment and humiliation, would never fully leave Dickens. He was a jack-of-all-trades, but achieved true success at 26, with the publication of the Pickwick Papers.
A Christmas Carol is a wonderful, and deceptively simple, story which relates a moving theme common to all human beings at one time or another: the need for rebirth and renewal. The tale introduces us to Scrooge, a wealthy, though avaricious, man, who on Christmas Eve is visited by four "ghosts." The first to visit old Scrooge was his deceased business partner and the other three, in succession, were the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future. These apparitions reveal what has been, what is and what just might be in store for Scrooge if he doesn't find some radical way of changing his life. In the end, Scrooge learns to laugh in ways he had never before experienced.
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