A point of interest for me this week was learning more about the historical context Dickens was writing in. Learning more about the material conditions of the Victorian working poor during the 1840s added a new layer of appreciation for the text. References to the “Poor Law” and the “Treadmill” in the first stave completely went over my head in my initial reading. It is clear to me now that Dickens was thinking about the conditions of working class people as he was writing A Christmas Carol, but also had a keen sense of his middle class audience. I suspect that Scrooge’s initial worldview—that human life and society is subordinate to profit and wealth—is reflective of the general attitudes of the capitalist class during the 1840s. In this way, I read A Christmas Carol as a cautionary tale to a presumed middle- to high-class audience about the repercussions of material greed on their immortal soul, and that encourages them to be more charitable in there earthly lives before it is too late for them to do anything. This threat of eternal guilt is provocatively expressed by Leech’s woodcut illustration at the end of stave 1 wherein we see a swarm of ghosts in an agitated state over not being able to help a homeless women and her child in their immaterial form to absolve them of their guilt.