A Christmas Carol

Marley’s ghost: original hand-coloured steel engraving by John Leech, 1843 (The Dickens Project, UC Santa Cruz)

I am spending a good deal of time with Scrooge at present, but not because A Christmas Carol is seasonal and festive (in places). Instead, Scrooge is my December companion because the novella is a set text for the Edexcel GCSE English Literature specification and my students are revising for January’s mock exams.

Despite his frosty, misanthropic persona, Scrooge - as visualised in the image above - makes me smile because that is exactly the expression that I pull when I begin a new Excel spreadsheet of expenses or accounts. No matter how hard I try, there is something about Excel that always puts me in mind of Scrooge and his counting house. I think that this is because spreadsheets assume some innate numeracy that doesn’t come easily to me. In fact, all those cells in need of population instantly make me feel as if I have been assailed by the gubbins chained to Marley’s ghost: “cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel.”

When I do manage to shrug off the novella’s fiscal weight, however, I enjoy re-visiting Dickens’ December with its sinuous fog that comes “pouring in at every chink and keyhole” like some gloomily insistent visitor.

The assessment objectives for the Edexcel syllabus require students to:

a) write ‘an informed personal response’ using ‘textual references’ (A01);

b) ‘Analyse the language, form and structure used … to create meaning and effects, using relevant terminology’ (AO2).

These assessment objectives mean that I have to restrain my excitement about the novella’s social, cultural and historical contexts because this knowledge is not rewarded in Paper 2. The grim reality is that it is all too easy to get carried away with Dickens’ representation of Victorian family values, only to look again at the syllabus and feel the sort of chill visible on Scrooge’s face when confronted with the spectre of his dead business partner.

When it come to exam preparation, assessment objectives are paramount. And yet students struggle to write perceptively about Dickens’ use of language, structure and form without some understanding of the novella’s context because London’s complex metropolitan energies define the characters’ lives. The teaching challenge, therefore, is to establish an awareness of the novella’s context as a foundation for the students’ close reading of Dickens’ language.

This afternoon, I will revise the opening of ‘Stave Two: The First of the Three Spirits’ with my Year 11 student. In this passage, Scrooge wakes in the dark, anxious about the spectral visitors whom he has been warned to expect. The unusual chiming of the church bell (“Twelve! It was past two when he went to bed”) warns Scrooge - and the reader - that events are about to take a ghostly turn. During the next few paragraphs, Scrooge takes the alarm clock / snooze button approach to time and equivocates with the clock’s evidence. “Why, it isn’t possible … It isn’t possible …” he tells himself. And then, of course, it is possible and the clock’s ‘deep, dull, hollow, melancholy ONE’ signals the arrival of a small child-old man figure beside his bed.

In close analysis, the insistence of the bell and Scrooge’s uneasy relationship with its temporal authority creates an uneasy humour which evokes his discomfort at the arrival of the supernatural in his life of ledgers and profit. Here, time gets the better of Scrooge and the heavy combination of alliteration and assonance in the adjectives describing the strike of ‘ONE’ give the sentence an aural weight. Then the personification of ‘melancholy’ characterises the church clock.

Students must be able to analyse literary features like these in a precise, perceptive manner if they are to achieve high marks and so literature teachers must encourage students to move beyond the simple naming of parts. Many students are very good indeed at identifying literary features and matching them to generic effects: ‘Ding dong’ is the onomatopoeic sound made by the church bell so the reader can hear it. The challenge, however, is give students the authority to interpret language with real sensitivity.

My strategy this afternoon is to use nineteenth century maps of London to investigate the proximity of the city’s parish churches. Using these images and colouring pens, my student and I can draw overlapping circles representing sound waves to imagine the soundscape of a city where bells marked time in fractions of an hour, day and night. This quick starter activity has the potential to inspire a thoughtful analysis of sound by demonstrating the circumstances in which Dickens manipulates time to intervene in the life of this miserly protagonist.