Today's lecture focused on Charles Dickens' infamous novella, A Christmas Carol. Although, the text is quite popular with its various adaptations, I have never actually read the actual text before taking this course. One of the most interesting things I noticed while annotating this particular text is that Dickens has a fondness for flowery writing and can go on endlessly describing whatever he is focusing on. As a result, I came across lots of words that I did not know or had different connotations in the 1840s versus now. One such word was: apoplectic which means extremely angry or indignant. Another thing that I found interesting was that in terms of present adaptations are  relatively faithful to Dickens' vision (atleast in my opinion). John Leech's illustrations were striking and very beautiful, especially the image, "The Third Visitor"; this is likely due to its vibrant colours in comparison to the other images. I appreciated the effort and skill needed to create those pictures. However,after learning that these images were coloured by women and young children that worked in poor conditions and were likely severely mistreated, the image lost its vibrancy. In our own cultural moment, the exploitation of women and children is not a thing of the past. In third world countries, large companies exploit these vulnerable populations for cheap labour, and think nothing of it. I think while studying these texts, it is important to explore and give voice to marganalized groups that are excluded from texts written by authors that very white, male-centric, and upperclass.