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A review by renee_ng
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
2.0
re-read for the first time since i was in primary school, more than 10 years ago, and enjoyed it significantly less. i do however, love the general plot and retain most of my nostalgia for it. would i re-read it next christmas? if i’m sad and needing a little cozy moment, sure! (update as of jan 2024: nope! i’d rather re-read the dark is rising!!)
even for a classic, a christmas carol runs thin with its empty messaging. i’m completely taken by dickens’ atmospheric writing, and the ghostly moments were some of the best parts of this short novel, but his surface level surveys of society in brackets: poor, kind, disabled, criminal were met with many eye rolls from me. using the marginalised to advance scrooge’s sense of morality and empathy… it’s in bad taste, really.
nevertheless i’m left quite fascinated by the excessive sentiments within this literary work. sentiments that demonstrate christmas, as a holiday, or collective (eurocentric) cultural effect, being quite divorced from christianity in victorian england (as with most of the world now), and fully existing within its loose stringing of rituals and virtues. (i don’t quite have a holiday like that in my culture, so it’s interesting for me!) if anything can be taken away from this piece of history, it’s perhaps the study of an english moral ideal during the victorian time, and how it societally and culturally manifests through christmas traditions.
even for a classic, a christmas carol runs thin with its empty messaging. i’m completely taken by dickens’ atmospheric writing, and the ghostly moments were some of the best parts of this short novel, but his surface level surveys of society in brackets: poor, kind, disabled, criminal were met with many eye rolls from me. using the marginalised to advance scrooge’s sense of morality and empathy… it’s in bad taste, really.
nevertheless i’m left quite fascinated by the excessive sentiments within this literary work. sentiments that demonstrate christmas, as a holiday, or collective (eurocentric) cultural effect, being quite divorced from christianity in victorian england (as with most of the world now), and fully existing within its loose stringing of rituals and virtues. (i don’t quite have a holiday like that in my culture, so it’s interesting for me!) if anything can be taken away from this piece of history, it’s perhaps the study of an english moral ideal during the victorian time, and how it societally and culturally manifests through christmas traditions.