History Forum / General / British History / December 2003

I have read that Dickens was an astute observer of people, that he would
note the way people spoke and their mannerisms.  Give a Dickens scholar a
name from Dickens's literature and the scholar will give you the name of the
real person Dickens had in mind.

Yet it seems to me that there is more to Dickens characters than that..  It
seems to me that Scrooge, for example, is more than just a portrait of some
old miser Dickens might have known.

Scrooge's ghostly visitors did not tell Scrooge anything he did not already
know.  Scrooge saw his own unhappy childhood, his broken engagement and the
happiness his lost fiancé found in another man.  He saw the goodness of his
sister and his nephew and his own faults in clear terms.  Scrooge could not
deny what he saw so acted on it to put things right.

How did Dickens know to show us Scrooge in such a way?  I think not by
simply noting and portraying  people around him, but by having an
understanding of human nature that was ahead of his time.

Acknowledging problems and coming to terms with them is right out of Freud's
book.  But Dickens was a generation before Freud.  No, Dickens was no simple
caricature artist.  Rather, he was an insightful man indeed!

Anyway, that's my opinion.

Merry Christmas, and God Bless Us All!

RK