Modern viewers: Scrooge doesn’t discuss what he’s learned or ask for redemption. He swiftly negates the life he would have led, had it not been for the ghostly interventions.
A modern Christmas Carol.
BBC/Scott Free/FX Networks
As well as founding England’s first million-selling newspaper, Lloyd shamelessly sold plagiarised versions of some of Charles Dickens’ best-loved novels.
Publicity still for Only Fools and Horses.
www.onlyfoolsmusical.com
If it hadn’t been for A Christmas Carol, the menu may well have centred on goose (or a boar’s head).
Almost 1,500 immigrant boys, aged 10 to 17, were separated from their parents and brought to stay at Casa Padre in Brownsville, Texas.
Department of Health and Human Services
There are strong parallels between the Trump administration’s policy on immigrant families and the 19th century’s ‘New’ Poor Laws of England, whose cruelty was illuminated by writer Charles Dickens.
George Cruikshank’s impression of Dickens’ dystopia.
Philip V. Allingham of Victorian Web
From outright celebration, through charity to explicit political salvos – is there such a thing as the ‘ultimate’ Christmas pop song?
Perhaps the designers of the first Christmas card from 1840 were influenced by Leigh Hunt’s question: Is it right to spend, laugh and revel when there are so many people who live in isolation and poverty? John Calcott Horsely, curator and designer of the card, asked the painter, Sir Henry Cole, to show people being fed and clothed to remind his friends of the needs of the poor during this season.
Leigh Hunt is a nineteenth-century writer who grappled with the question: How can we celebrate and enjoy ourselves at this time of the year when there is so much misery in the world?