Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Paul Davis

Critical Essay by Paul Davis

SOURCE: “The Greening of Scrooge,” in The Lives and Times of Ebenezer Scrooge, Yale University Press, 1990, pp. 173–212.

In the following essay from his full-length study of Dickens's novella, Davis contrasts the British and American versions, adaptations, and modernizations of A Christmas Carol.

Consciousness III sees not merely a set of political and public wrongs, such as a liberal New Dealer might have seen, but also the deeper ills that Kafka or the German expressionists or Dickens would have seen.

—Charles Reich, 1970

When one observes that we devote a lion's share of our national budget to war and destruction, that capble scientists are tied up in biological and chemical warfare research that would make Frankenstein and his science-fiction colleagues look like Doctor Doolittle, we cannot avoid the question, do Americans hate life?

—Philip Slater, 1970

Comparing A Christmas Carol with Herman Melville's “Bartleby the Scrivener,” Pearl Solomon noted...
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