The Ceremony of Innocence: Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol

PMLA ◽  
1975 ◽  
Vol 90 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elliot L. Gilbert
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Case History ◽  
Spiritual Recovery ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of

AbstractSophisticated readers of A Christmas Carol, moved though they may be by the dramatic reformation of Scrooge, are frequently inclined to question the psychological validity of the old man's change of heart. Far from being a sign of the story's inadequacy, however, this divided reaction is the key to its effectiveness. Dickens' chief target in A Christmas Carol is Scrooge's nineteenth-century rationalism, and the reader's skepticism about the old man's moral and spiritual recovery is an exact analogue of that rationalism. What the reader's delight, in the face of his skepticism, suggests, therefore, is that there is a level of the story on which Scrooge's regeneration is entirely authentic; that if A Christmas Carol is less than convincing as a psychological case history of an elderly neurotic temporarily reformed by Christmas sentimentality, it is certainly a success as the metaphysical study of a human being's rediscovery of his own innocence.

Town histories and Victorian plaudits: some examples from Preston

Urban History ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 58-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. J. Vickery
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Historical Geography ◽  
Rich Source ◽  
History Writing ◽  
The North ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Town

Charles Dickens visited Preston in January 1854 to report on the cotton lock-out of that year. What he saw contributed to his vision of the archetypal northern, urban industrial centre, Coketown:It was a town of red brick or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves forever and ever and never got uncoiled.Three years later a rather different topographical account appeared in Charles Hardwick's history of the borough:Notwithstanding the occasional carpings of a few splenetic travellers, Preston is generally and deservedly recognized as one of the cleanest and most pleasantly situated manufacturing towns in England. The cotton factories are chiefly erected to the north and east of the old aristocratic borough …. and do not as yet materially interfere with the more ‘fashionable’ or picturesque sections of the district.The contrast illuminates the shortcomings of the town history both as literature and historical geography; but indicates the tenor of Prestonian self-justification. It is precisely this prosaic subjectivity which makes the histories a rich source. As Peter Clark asserts, ‘even fifth-rate urban historians sometimes have an important story to tell.’Unlike many other towns with long-established traditions of urban chronicling, history writing in Preston did not blossom until the nineteenth century.

scholarly journals When commerce, science, and leisure collaborated: the nineteenth-century global trade boom in natural history collections

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 319-339 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Coote ◽  
Alison Haynes ◽  
Jude Philp ◽  
Simon Ville
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Global Trade ◽  
Global History ◽  
Remote Areas ◽  
Business Logistics ◽  
Natural History Collections ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of

AbstractNatural history products formed an important, but little studied, component of the globalization of trade in the mid nineteenth century. The trade, specifically in zoology, occurred in the face of considerable challenges. It penetrated some of the more remote areas of the globe; its products were heterogeneous and difficult to price; and exchange occurred among scientists, commercial traders, and collectors, each of whom had their own particular practices and mores. This article charts the dimensions of this trade and offers explanations about the ways in which its complexities were addressed through major developments in taxidermy, taxonomy, transport and business logistics, alternative forms of exchange, and trust-based networks. More broadly, our work speaks to current developments in global history, imperial networks, and the history of scientific collecting.

Beyond the Bourgeoisie: Rethinking Nation, Culture, and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Central Europ

1998 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karl F. Baham
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
Liberal Society ◽  
Liberal Politics ◽  
Mass Politics ◽  
Long Time ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of

The historyof Central Europe at the end of the nineteenth century (as indeed at the end of the twentieth) is to a large extent the history of the furies of nationalism. The attempt to understand that fact has for a long time been dominated by understandings of nationalism and the mobilization of national identity that are rooted in conceptions of a particularly modern social and political crisis. In this paradigm the rise of nationalism is associated—as it was for many critical observers at the time—with the failure of liberal politics and the general breakdown of an elite-dominated, rational-liberal society in the face of mass politics and the clamor for cultural and political participation by the lower classes. Nationalism in this view is a rejection of the whole liberal paradigm—a turn to a militant, populist “politics in a new key,” to use Carl Schorske's evocative phrase; or, following another imagery, the revenge of the traditionalist, irrational “dark gods” against the rationalism, secular optimism, and elitism of Enlightenment society.

THE GHOST IN THE CLINIC: GOTHIC MEDICINE AND CURIOUS FICTION IN SAMUEL WARREN'SDIARY OF A LATE PHYSICIAN

2004 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 327-351 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meegan Kennedy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Case History ◽  
Clinical Medicine ◽  
Medical Discourse ◽  
Critical Element ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Case Histories ◽  
Gothic Novel ◽  
History Of ◽  
Medical Vision

IN 1856, WHEN MANY VICTORIAN PHYSICIANS WERE STRUGGLING TO DEFINE A MODEL OF CLINICAL MEDICINE, the reviewer of one collection of case histories voiced his dismay at the physician-author's preference for “dreadful incidents” and “cases exceptional and strange” (“Works” 473). Indeed, although physicians of the clinical era did not disguise their efforts to achieve a new kind of discourse, productive of a “realist” vision, few acknowledge how often the “clinical” case history of the nineteenth century also shares the romantic discourse of the Gothic, especially its interest in the supernatural and the unexplainable and its narrative aim of arousing suspense, horror, and astonishment in the reader. Literary critics have also focused primarily on the association of medical narrative with a realist literary discourse. Nineteenth-century physicians did campaign for the formal, objective, and professional clinical discourse that serves as their contribution to a realist aesthetic, in the process explicitly rejecting eighteenth-century medicine's fascination with “the curious” and its subterranean affiliation with the unknown, the unexplainable, and the subjective. But, as I show in this article, a discourse of “the curious,” allied with a Gothic literary aesthetic, stubbornly remained a critical element of many case histories, though it often presented under the mask of the more acceptable term, “interesting.” The discourse of Gothic romance in the case history provides a narrative frame that, unlike the essentially realist clinical discourse, could make sense of the physician's curious gaze, which had become nearly unrecognizable as a specifically medical vision. Indeed, a “curious” medical discourse haunts even case histories of the high clinical era, late in the century; and it energizes the nineteenth-century Gothic novel. Samuel Warren's novelPassages from the Diary of a Late Physician–deplored in the quotation above–illuminates this tradition of “Gothic medicine” as it plays out in the nineteenth-century novel. This tradition, I argue, provides the novel with a powerful model of cultural contamination and conflict in its yoking of disparate discourses. Gothic medicine demonstrates the importance of clinical medicine to literary romance, and it cannot help but reveal the ghost of “the curious” in the clinic.

scholarly journals Bodily signs and case history in Indian morgues: what makes a medico-legal autopsy complete?

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 22-37
Author(s):  
Fabien Provost
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Forensic Medicine ◽  
Case History ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
The Body ◽  
North India ◽  
Post Mortem ◽  
History Of ◽  
Practical Sense

In contemporary forensic medicine, in India, the label of complete autopsy applies to a whole range of post-mortem examinations which can present consid- erable differences in view of the intellectual resources, time, personnel and material means they involve. From various sources available in India and elsewhere, stems the idea that, whatever the type of case and its apparent obviousness, a complete autopsy implies opening the abdomen, the thorax and the skull and dissecting the organs they contain. Since the nineteenth century, procedural approaches of complete autopsies have competed with a practical sense of completeness which requires doctors to think their cases according to their history. Relying on two case studies observed in the frame of an ethnographic study of eleven months in medical colleges of North India, the article suggests that the practical completeness of autopsies is attained when all aspects of the history of the case are made sense of with regard to the observation of the body. Whereas certain autopsies are considered obvious and imply a reduced amount of time in the autopsy room, certain others imply successive redefinitions of what complete implies and the realisation of certain actions which would not have been performed otherwise.

OBSERVATIONS ON THE ETIOLOGY OF DWARFISM IN CONGENITAL TELANGIECTATIC ERYTHEMA

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1957 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 268-271
Author(s):  
D. A. Hillman ◽  
J. D. Crawford ◽  
N. B. Talbot
Keyword(s):  
Short Stature ◽  
Growth Retardation ◽  
Case History ◽  
Linear Growth ◽  
Skin Pigmentation ◽  
Skin Lesions ◽  
Fat Deposits ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cortisone Therapy

The case history of a boy with growth retardation, caloric undernutrition, telangiectatic skin lesions on the face and areas of altered skin pigmentation is presented. Administration of cortisone resulted in improvement of the appetite and significant weight gains. Following discontinuation of cortisone therapy, spurts in linear growth were observed which appeared to be limited and probably related to the utilization of fat deposits accumulated during an earlier period of cortisone administration. It is concluded that the short stature observed in this patient was a function of caloric undernutrition.

Character

Picture World ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 21-83
Author(s):  
Rachel Teukolsky
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Class ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Urban Economy ◽  
Reform Era ◽  
Realist Novel ◽  
Lower Middle Class ◽  
History Of

“Character” is often studied as the deep psychological self crafted by the nineteenth-century realist novel. Yet Chapter 1 proposes an alternative history of character by looking to caricature, in some of the earliest comics (“Galleries of Comicalities”) appearing in sporting newspapers in the 1830s. Early caricatures portrayed an idea of character that was grotesque, masculinist, and brilliantly exteriorized, especially in depictions of “the cockney,” the urban mischief-man whose subversive masculinity reflected the economic pressures of the new urban economy. Cartoons featuring the cockney were anti-authoritarian, carnivalesque, and often laced with crude racism and misogyny. Their mock-violent energy gave voice to some of the explosive frustration felt by working- and lower-middle-class men after the failures of the Reform Bill of 1832. The young Charles Dickens borrowed many of his earliest subjects from extant caricature motifs, reflecting some of the fundamental instabilities of social class and economic precarity defining the Reform Era.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-40
Author(s):  
Ushashi Dasgupta
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Property Market ◽  
Spatial Turn ◽  
Domestic Ideology ◽  
Preliminary Discussion ◽  
History Of ◽  
Economic Transaction

The Introduction offers a preliminary discussion of what Charles Dickens calls the ‘lodger world’, and it establishes the book’s main lines of argument. It explains that tenancy, an economic transaction realized in space, was a central aspect of everyday life in the nineteenth century. An overwhelming majority of Victorians did not own their homes outright. Instead, they were tenants: while single families could take entire houses on lease, lodgers lived in rooms overseen by landladies, and these many kinds of rented space captured Dickens’s imagination. The pervasive need to rent in the period encourages a reassessment of middle-class domestic ideology. The Introduction surveys the history of the property market, reviews Dickens’s active participation in rental culture throughout his life, and describes a number of his creative relationships. It considers the ‘spatial turn’ in cultural studies, and ultimately sets up a link between rented space, narrative, and genre in Dickens’s thinking.

From Heroism to Heterodoxy: The Crisis of a Movement and the Danger to a Faith

2008 ◽  
pp. 4-17
Author(s):  
David Berger
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Educational Systems ◽  
Dominant Form ◽  
Common Culture ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Town ◽  
Established Order

This chapter traces the history of hasidism, which was born in eighteenth-century Poland with the teachings of Rabbi Israel Ba'al Shem Tov. The movement spread through eastern Europe and became the dominant form of Judaism in much of the heartland of nineteenth-century Jewry. Opponents (mitnagedim or ‘misnagdim’) did not entirely abandon the cause, but opposition waned in the face of new social and religious realities. First, it became very difficult to delegitimate a movement that commanded the allegiance of so many observant Jews. Second, the radicalism of early hasidism diminished as it was transformed from a movement of rebellion against the Jewish communal establishment into an established order of its own. Finally, the spread of the Jewish Enlightenment, or Haskalah, to eastern Europe posed so serious a threat that hasidim and misnagdim, for all their profound differences, came to see themselves as allies in a struggle to preserve their common culture, educational systems, and fundamental beliefs against the onslaught of scepticism, secularism, and acculturation working to undermine the very foundations of traditional Jewish society. The Chabad movement, now also known as Lubavitch from the town where the group's leaders resided from 1813 to 1915, played a significant role in that resistance.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document