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A Christmas Carol - 1931- Dicken Radio plays
Category: Arts
Duration: 00:40:02
Publish Date: 2006-12-20 12:58:58
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Lisa Laco, Host: Well we're going to talk about Charles Dickens right now because Charles Dickens is ever foremost in our minds this week as we get ready to read Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol this weekend here in Thunder Bay. When he was about ten years old poverty forced him to take a job in a factory to provide for his family. Now he was so ashamed of his time there that he never told anyone about it, but he couldn't hide the secret totally. According to Philip the experience surfaces in the actions and the attitudes of many of Charles Dickens, especially in Ebenezer Scrooge from A Christmas Carol . Philip Allingham is a professor in the Faculty of Education at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay; he's also a Dickens scholar. CBC reporter Cathy Alex asked him what inspired Charles Dickens to write A Christmas Carol . Philip V. Allingham, Faculty of Education, Lakehead University, Dickens Scholar: He was fascinated by German ghost stories; in fact, he had written himself one in the middle of Pickwick Papers in 1836. In the fall of 1843 he was invited to go to Manchester, where he saw a good deal of urban poor, prostitution, other social ills. He and a number of other Victorian reformers including Cobden and Disraeli were to speak and so he heard all the tales of horror in industrial society. He saw a great deal of it; he stayed with his sister whom he loved very much--remember Scrooge's relationship with his sister. And his sister had a little boy who was lame; he probably had what we call now Pot's disease, tuberculosis of the bone, if you can imagine. So there is Tiny Tim, who was originally by the way called "Tiny Fred" after Dickens' younger brother, but "Tiny Fred" doesn't really make it does it. So in proof he corrected that to "Tiny Tim." He also put in the famous "God bless us, everyone!"--it wasn't in the original manuscript. And I think he was also interested in trying to help the ragged schools that were trying to educate poor children at night. These children worked in factories during the daytime. And so all of these things were fermenting in his mind and, like a great Coleridgian dream, A Christmas Carol was born.
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