Have a Capitalist Christmas: The Critique of Christmas Time in "A Christmas Carol"

An audience member's gleeful first-hand account of Charles Dickens's public reading of "A Christmas Carol" unwittingly exposes an often overlooked contradiction in the story's climax: "Finally, there is Scrooge, no longer a miser, but a human being, screaming at the 'conversational' boy in Sunday clothes, to buy him the prize turkey 'that never could have stood upon his legs, that bird'" (96). Perhaps he is no longer a miser but, by this description, Scrooge still plays …

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