It is significant that the Ghost of Christmas Present shows Scrooge the two children he
calls Ignorance and Want; Dickens is suggesting that the children are here in this present
moment of time. Their appearance in the novella can therefore not be ignored..
The children are described as ‘wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable’.
The word ‘wretched’ shows that the children are incredibly unhappy and unfortunate; ‘abject’
means that they have no pride or dignity; ‘frightful’ connotes that their appearance
is unpleasant and shocking; ‘hideous’ means extremely ugly; while ‘miserable’
shows that they are unhappy. Dickens deliberately uses these adjectives to shock the reader.
This is particularly effective due to Dickens’ use of structure, as the reader has just read
a detailed account of the cheerful Christmas festivities at Fred’s, followed by Scrooge’s
whistle-stop tour around ‘many homes […] always with a happy end’. The jarring change in
tone created by the appearance of these children is completely out of sync with earlier celebrations.
This is the ‘ sledgehammer blow’ that Dickens aimed to strike when he decided to
write a novella instead of a pamphlet. The writer continues to use listing when he
describes the children as ‘Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish’. It is almost
as if poverty has dehumanised them. The adjective ‘yellow’ connotes illness, possibly caused
by jaundice; the word ‘meagre’ means lacking in quantity of quality, implying that the
children are malnourished and undersized because they have not had enough food to grow properly;
‘ragged’ means that they are literally wearing rags, so they are woefully underdressed
in the middle of winter; ‘scowling’ shows that they are frowning in an angry, bad-tempered
way; while ‘wolfish’ compares them to wolves, connoting that they are dehumanised
and more like predatory animals than children. This idea is developed when Dickens describes
them as ‘monsters’. The descriptions of the children, which aim
to shock, are based on Dickens’s experiences. In 1846, he published ‘A letter on Ragged
Schooling’ in The Daily News, in which he recorded his remembrances of a visit to Field
Lane Ragged School in London
The name implies the purpose. They who are too ragged, wretched, filthy, and forlorn,
to enter any other place: who could gain admission into no charity school, and who would be driven
from any church door; are invited to come in here, and find some people not depraved,
willing to teach them something, and show them some sympathy, and stretch a hand out,
which is not the iron hand of Law, for their correction.
Attendance at ragged schools was erratic, and Dickens in his letter noted that the ‘system’
of education was ‘imperfect’. He criticised the ‘frightful neglect by the State’ (i.e.
government) and appealed for more money to educate children and get them out of the cycle
of poverty.
We can almost hear Dickens’s voice when the Ghost of Christmas Present declares:
They are Man’s and they cling to me… appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance.
This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this
boy for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.
To help us to understand the children’s names, let’s first return to Dickens’s
letter, in which he describes a crowd of boys: Huddled together on a bench about the room,
and shown out by some flaring candles stuck against the walls, were a crowd of boys, varying
from mere infants to young men; sellers of fruit, herbs, lucifer-matches, flints; sleepers
under the dry arches of bridges; young thieves and beggars–with nothing natural to youth
about them: with nothing frank, ingenuous, or pleasant in their faces; low-browed, vicious,
cunning, wicked; abandoned of all help but this; speeding downward to destruction; and
UNUTTERABLY IGNORANT.
Like Ignorance and Want, the boys are depicted as wicked devils. What is worse is their ignorance:
they have not been educated. They do not know how to behave. Dickens urges his readers to
visit Ragged Schools, saying they will be ‘shocked, pained, and repelled’ by conditions
there. In 1843, Dickens wrote to Angela Burdett-Coutts,
one of the wealthiest women in England: in the prodigious misery and ignorance of
the swarming masses of mankind in England, the seeds of its certain ruin are sown.
Dickens suggests that Ignorance leads to Want. If people are educated and equipped with the
skills to work, they will earn honest money. The money will enable them to provide for
their families, eliminating Want. Education is therefore a tool to break the cycle of
poverty. Dickens makes the important point that, in a time when going to school was not
compulsory for all children, the poor could only hope to climb out of poverty through
education.
Well I hope you found this video useful. Everything I go through in this video series can be found
in the second edition of 'Mr Bruff's Guide to 'A Christmas Carol''. The links are in
the description; you can pick up a copy. Please do subscribe, and like the video.