A standard reading of A Christmas Carol, as presented in most adaptations, suggests that winning the hearts and minds of greedy, miserly, and spiteful people in positions of power is a sufficient first step to solving poverty and the other social ills stemming from it. But Dickens constantly wrote stories steeped in themes stemming from Victorian-era poverty and stark, unmistakable class stratification and would clearly have a more cynical view of the situation; it's telling that it takes a supernatural force like Marley's ghost and the three spirits to even get Scrooge to consider being less of a miserly dick to everyone around him, when in the first act he's presented as a lost cause. This subtext is stripped away in most 20th- and 21st-century adaptations which present the story in a vacuum, independent of the context provided from Dickens's other work (particularly later, more jaded stories like Great Expectations, which feels like a gritty parody of Oliver Twist).
Someone here mentioned Mao’s treatment of Puyi and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. Scrooge basically gets the Puyi treatment, except with Puyi it took years of meeting with literal human experimentation victims to make him into a comrade, while one night with a trio of ghosts turned Scrooge from a shitty business owner to a “good” business owner.
I am not an expert on Dickens but my suspicion is that he would view the poverty in the world as part of human nature and more or less impossible to undo. I once attempted to read “Bleak House” and my impression there was of a static, rotten-to-the-core, utterly hopeless civilization.
A standard reading of A Christmas Carol, as presented in most adaptations, suggests that winning the hearts and minds of greedy, miserly, and spiteful people in positions of power is a sufficient first step to solving poverty and the other social ills stemming from it. But Dickens constantly wrote stories steeped in themes stemming from Victorian-era poverty and stark, unmistakable class stratification and would clearly have a more cynical view of the situation; it's telling that it takes a supernatural force like Marley's ghost and the three spirits to even get Scrooge to consider being less of a miserly dick to everyone around him, when in the first act he's presented as a lost cause. This subtext is stripped away in most 20th- and 21st-century adaptations which present the story in a vacuum, independent of the context provided from Dickens's other work (particularly later, more jaded stories like Great Expectations, which feels like a gritty parody of Oliver Twist).
Someone here mentioned Mao’s treatment of Puyi and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. Scrooge basically gets the Puyi treatment, except with Puyi it took years of meeting with literal human experimentation victims to make him into a comrade, while one night with a trio of ghosts turned Scrooge from a shitty business owner to a “good” business owner.
I am not an expert on Dickens but my suspicion is that he would view the poverty in the world as part of human nature and more or less impossible to undo. I once attempted to read “Bleak House” and my impression there was of a static, rotten-to-the-core, utterly hopeless civilization.