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Charles Dickens: Carrying a Burden of Social Responsibility

Decent Essays

Charles Dickens: Carrying a Burden of Social Responsibility Charles Dickens’ classic novella A Christmas Carol, focuses on the social responsibility of the wealthy to help the poor and less fortunate. Dickens, having lived in poverty as a child, knew of the many struggles of the lower class of London. As an author, he made it his goal to reform England as best he could. Many of his works ran in his weekly journal, Household Words, including "Christmas Stories" and Great Expectations. In a Christmas Carol, Dickens stresses the point that the writers of that time carried a special burden to speak out for those who lived in poverty and couldn't speak out for themselves. Dickens published A Christmas Carol in 1843. He had published …show more content…

Inmates broke rock, ground corn by hand, picked oakum, and ground animal bones for fertilizer and manufacturing.(Spencer) In some workhouses, "inmates assigned to bone grinding were observed gnawing the bones they were to grind."(Spencer) In A Christmas Carol two men approached Scrooge and asked for a donation to benefit the poor. They said, "Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir."

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