Within the text of Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," Ebeneezer Scrooge finds redemption, as initiated by the ghost of his former business partner, Jacob Marley. Marley, and the three spirits who pay Scrooge an unwelcomed visit on Christmas Eve,are central to Dickens' message regarding London's failure to exhibit social responsibility. .
In Stave One, Scrooge is described as a character with little care for those around him; "a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, covetous old sinner, hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire." He refuses to donate money to help people who are "badly off," insisting that "if they would rather die" than go to the cruelly overcrowded prisons and workhouses of 19th century London, "they had better do so, and decrease the surplus population." .
In "A Christmas Carol," readers are given a character who is so detached from society that he feels his only responsibilities are his self-serving financial matters. This early description of Scrooge is Dickens' condemnation of the wealthy industrial class that emerged in the 19th century, particularly during the industrial revolution, who abused their social privilege and took advantage of those in "need and want." In the same stave, Dickens uses Marley to reveal the consequences of neglecting ones fellow man; he is doomed in death to "witness what [he] cannot share, but might have shared and turned to happiness," weighed down by a "ponderous chain of "cash boxes [and] padlocks" that he'd "forged in [his] life." Marley states that "mankind was [his] business charity, mercy, forbearance and benevolence.," and that the only way Scrooge, who had a chain "as long and ponderous" as he'd had seven years ago, could escape the same fate was by realizing his social responsibility. In this sense, the redemption of Scrooge's character comes only from the realization of his social responsibility; it is the reward that Dickens gives to his Ebeneezer for pursuing self-betterment.
Dante, spokesman in his Christian day, writes a guidebook for Hell and, in doing so, questions his own rocky past and his chances for Hell, for Heaven. Dante, a Christian poet living during a Christian age, sets out to write a poem about his fictionalized version of Hell. I believe Dante...
