A Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens(1843)
Extract
Marley was dead, to begin with.
On Christmas Eve a miser counts his coins while his clerk shivers over a single coal, and the dead return to teach the living what time means. Dickens wrote his 1843 novella in six feverish weeks, walking London's streets at night, driven by the intuition that a ghost story could accomplish what a parliamentary report could not. Scrooge's journey through past, present, and future is a compressed Divine Comedy for the industrial age, a soul reckoning with its own calcification. The prose shifts from grotesquerie to tenderness without warning. Tiny Tim is sentimental, yes, but the sentimentality is earned by the ferocity of the social vision surrounding him. Dickens gave a secular age its moral fable, and the fable has not finished its work.
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Dickens returns to the same theme of moral transformation, but gives Pip a lifetime where Scrooge gets a single night.
Tolstoy confronts a man with his wasted life the same way, but there are no second chances in Russia.
Hugo builds the same argument that people can change, but needs fifteen hundred pages where Dickens needs thirty.