Criticism > Short Story Criticism > A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens - Robert L. Patten (essay date 1971)

A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens - Robert L. Patten (essay date 1971)

Robert L. Patten (essay date 1971)

SOURCE: “Dickens Time and Again,” in Dickens Studies Annual, Vol. 2, 1971, pp. 163–96.

[In the following essay, Patten examines the sudden conversion of Scrooge, contending that it is related to the surge in popularity of religious tracts during the 1840s.]

My purpose was, in a whimsical kind of masque which the good humour of the season justified, to awaken some loving and forbearing thoughts, never out of season in a Christian land. I have the happiness of believing that I did not wholly miss it.

—Charles Dickens, Preface to the Cheap Edition, Christmas Books1

Justly admired though his essay on “Dickens: The Two Scrooges” is, Edmund Wilson surely does not reflect the response of most readers of A Christmas Carol when he posits that Scrooge's conversion is temporary. For Wilson, the melodramatic dual world of early Dickens...

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