“A Christmas Carol” is one of those essential symbols at this time of year. The miserly Ebenezer Scrooge transforms into a generous man and embraces compassion after being visited by three ghosts who make him contemplate his dark future.
The tale has inspired dozens of stories and films and even Disney Studios, where Carl Barks created Scrooge McDuck – Uncle Scrooge in English.
Dickens is giant. By writing in chapters, he perfected the art of the “cliffhanger” — leaving the reader waiting for what would happen in the next chapter, just like today’s soap operas and series. He also places children as protagonists of his stories, inspired by his own misfortune. As a child, his father was arrested and he was forced to live with strangers and work in a grease factory to support himself.
From necessity comes habit. Dickens grew up as a solitary walker, covering up to twenty miles a day, roaming the streets of London, conscious of his compulsion: “If I could not walk fast and go far, I had better burst and perish.” From observations of walks comes the freshness and precision of the descriptions of his characters and the city.
In “Oliver Twist”, the classic story of the poor boy struggling to survive in the gloomy city, the desolate and precise description of the street market is impressive: “It was market day; the mud was up to the ankles; thick steam rose from the bodies of the animals and merged with the fog into which the chimneys disappeared.”
These are rich, striking details that only someone walking through mud can see. For Chesterton, Dickens had “the key to the street.”
Dickens’s greatness also manifests itself, surprisingly, through another facet: literature as a force for social change. The first city in the industrial world to reach a million inhabitants, London presented a real and daily danger: cars overwhelming pedestrians, pollution, mud, horse droppings, violence, theft and even open sewers.
The vividness and popularity of his stories helped bring the issue of urban reform to the attention of London’s elite. Just six years after the publication of “A Casa Soturna,” work on the city’s underground sewage began. Fiction has transformed the world, in addition to reflecting it.
For the year that begins in a week, perhaps the story of the writer-walker can inspire the inhabitants of a contemporary metropolis like ours to take to the streets and walk; not just those who make art, but also those who teach, those who work in an office, accountants, programmers and politicians.
While walking, everyone can put aside petty controversies on social networks and temporarily immerse themselves in the crowd, enjoy, describe or transform the city.
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