The primary recipients of Scrooge's moral rebirth are his poor clerk Bob Cratchit and his family, especially the crippled boy Tiny Tim. Scrooge awakens from his illusions and delivers a turkey to the Cratchit household, gives Tim a raise and reconciles with his nephew.
Commentary
The novella exemlpifies Dickens's vigorous opposition to those Victorian social reformers who believed like Scrooge that charity encouraged idleness and the poor should be left to die.
The author, in the 1843 Preface, writes:
I have endeavored in this Ghostly little book to raise the Ghost of an Idea which shall not put my readers out of humor with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their house pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it.
More of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens at Christmas Carnivals.
|
