On The Romantic Tendency In Dickens' A Christmas Carol

Charles Dickens is hailed as one of the greatest literary geniuses of all time and one of the most popular realistic writers of his time. For the convenience of study, Dickens'literary career may be roughly divided into three periods. In Charles Dickens first period, and especially in Sketches by Boz and the Pickwick papers, fun, high spirit, and a tendency even to literary boisterous play---alternating sometimes with spells of sentimentality---strikes the dominant note. The morals illustrated by the novels of this period are:"cheats never thrive","be sure your sin will find you out","virtue will triumph in the long run". In this stage Charles Dickens believed that all the evils of the capitalist world would be remedied if only men behaved to each other with kindliness, justice, and sympathetic understanding. The true line of policy for humanity is, using Robert Burns'words, that"man to man, the world o'er, should brother be for a'that."There were, rich people and poor, of course, but these were casual, accidental, and transitory divisions whose ill effects would disappear if only the rich used their power and wealth sympathetically to assist the poor to escape from poverty. He thought that the whole social question would be settled if only every employer reformed himself according to the model set by the benevolent gentlemen in his novels. This na?ve optimism is characteristic of the petty bourgeois humanitarians of his time. In Charles Dickens second period which began from 1842, the year after his first visit to America. Before the visit, Dickens thought of the United States as a world in which there were no class divisions and the relations between men were humanitarian. Charles Dickens noticed during his visit the free and easy friendliness of the common people, the American hospitality, and the unaffected care for strangers, the various state laws regulating child labor, free, public education, and the cleanliness and order of some public institutions. But what impressed him most there were the rule of dollars and the enormously corrupting influence of wealth and power. Vulgar selfishness prevailed everywhere and concealed the fine qualities of the people. Dickens'na?ve optimism about capitalist society was thus profoundly shaken. This shock stung him into writing American Notes, a book of sketches, and Martin Chuzzlewit. The Third period of Charles Dickens'literary career began with the publication of Bleak House in 1852---1853. His novels of this period are much"darker"in content than their predecessors."Charles Dickens, consciously and subconsciously, shows himself more and more at odds with bourgeois society and more and more aware of the absence of any readily available alternative."Up to this time Charles Dickens maintained some hope of reform under capitalism but beginning from Bleak House there was an"underlying tone of bitterness"which showed the novelist's loss of hope for English bourgeois society.He is widely and thoroughly studied on his creative thoughts of Realism for many years, which attributes to the situation that there was no progress on the study of Charles Dickens. In fact, Dickens, as a great realistic novelist, fully inherits and develops the tradition of Romanticism. A Christmas Carol, one of his short stories, typically reflects this tendency.Romanticism, as an ideological trend or literature method study, comes into being from the late eighteenth century and prevails in the early nineteenth century, which has a great influence on British Literature, even on European-American Literature. Romanticism advocates the return to nature, the concern for children and the emphasis on imagination, all of which are reflected in A Christmas Carol. There are three parts in this thesis. Part one briefly analyzes Dickens'love for nature in A Christmas Carol; Part two concentrates on Dickens'child-complex in this novel; Part three focuses on making an analysis of imagination in A Christmas Carol. Based on the above analysis, the thesis comes to the conclusion that A Christmas Carol typically reflects Dickens'tendency of Romanticism.