A Christmas Carol

Saturday Drama

lessons We are going to listen a clip from a BBC Radio 4 programme, Saturday Drama, where the presenter, Neil Brand, discusses how people in Victorian England would have responded to Scrooge.

Task: as we listen, complete the True or False activity based on what we hear. If you have answered ‘False’, write the correct answer below.

True / False 1. At the time the novella was first published, Dickens’ contemporaries viewed Scrooge as a miserly figure.

______True / False 2. Scrooge spouts political economy – the ‘dismal science’. ______True / False 3. The reverend Robert Malthus claimed that as long as we were sensible and helped each other, there would be enough food and money for all in society.

______

True / False 4. Scrooge would have been condemned by many people in Victorian England, as they would have thought his behaviour

was very out of the ordinary.

______

True / False 5. Neil Brand (the presenter) is saying that Dickens was using

Scrooge to criticise his contemporaries, believing their Malthusian view was a scandalous and corrupt vision of human behaviour.

______True / False 6. Brand believes the book is about owing each other much more than an economic theory would ever permit.

______

A Christmas Carol Saturday Drama

Welessons are going to listen a clip from a BBC Radio 4 programme, Saturday Drama, where the presenter, Neil Brand, is discussing how people in Victorian England would have responded to Scrooge.

Answers

1. People viewed him as a Malthusian, not a miser (see number 4 for more information on Malthus). As time has went on, Scrooge has been turned into a miserly stock figure of a hard-hearted skin flint. 2. Scrooge spouts political economy – the ‘dismal science’. 3. The reverend Robert Malthus claimed the food supply would never grow as fast as the population, so humanity was doomed to live on the brink of starvation. 4. Scrooge would have been admired by many people in Victorian England, as he is many ways a zeitgeist (an 18th-19th Century German concept meaning ‘spirit of the time’) of looking after one’s own business and finances. 5. Neil Brand (the presenter) is saying that Dickens was using Scrooge to criticise his contemporaries, believing their Malthusian view was a scandalous and corrupt vision of human behaviour. 6. Brand believes the book is about owing each other much more than an economic theory would ever permit.