English at Brockington
A Guide to Year 9
A Christmas Carol
Topic Overview
In this topic you will first gather some basic knowledge of the Victorian era and the man himself, Charles Dickens. You will spend a lot of time looking into what Dickens experienced in his early life and begin to propose how this may have impacted his works. You will look into some of the basic themes he had throughout his career as a writer, in particular, what he thought of the separation between the rich and the poor in the country.
This will prepare you for reading through, and learning about, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens which covers many of these themes previously studied. You will study Scrooge and his relationships with the characters during the start and how this was different earlier in his life. With all this in mind you will then plot how he changes throughout the story as the various ghosts haunt him.
Skills
This topic focuses on character analysis and comparing this to the context of the book - i.e. how scrooge acts through the story and how this relates to other employers in the Victorian era.
You will need this to look at Scrooge through the book and evaluate him and how he feels about certain themes or other characters.
At the end you will need to compare Scrooge to other Victorian businessmen, and from this you will need to evaluate how the intended audience would feel about the character, whether their thoughts would be positive or negative and how controversial this work may have been.
Recommended Reading
I would recommend you read a variety of works written around the same time as this was and any other books written by Charles Dickens. You will then be able to pick out the features of his works unique to his time and how he differed and was similar to his fellow authors.
You should also read into and research the Victorian period as a whole as this will give you a greater idea of how different the time was to today and you can then find how this would affect the works written then.