1. How structural progression is shown across our Literature texts: A Christmas Carol, and Romeo and Juliet

4. A Christmas Carol - Food
By Scrooge eating ‘his melancholy dinner alone in his usual melancholy tavern’ and rejecting Fred’s offer of dinner, Dickens is highlighting the extreme nature of Scrooge’s stance as it was exceptionally rare at Xmas time. (Look at all other city folk and over-worked shopkeepers! Christmas time and food was something to be shared)
Did Dickens invent ‘Christmas Dinner’? The delight in food shown in the novel was infectious. Plum Pudding was called Christmas Pudding for the first time by a food writer, Eliza Acton shortly after the publication of A Christmas Carol! Food is personified as a wonderful, uniting, social levelling force throughout from the ‘Winking Spanish onions’ to the Turkey at the end ‘He could never have stood upon his legs, that bird’.
CONTEXT LINK - Dickens believed everyone had the right to basic necessities like food from the ‘Lord Mayor to the (drunken) tailor’ STAVE 1. It asserted their status as a family and was understood to be a happy time. The horror of being denied this basic right as the under-class is personified with the female figure of ‘Want’ where ‘graceful youth should have filled (her) features out’ but instead she is prematurely aged, shrivelled and wretched. –CONTEXT -Perhaps a link to Dickens’ own lack of food when father was sent to Debtors’ prison –Dickens salivating at shop fronts?
After being humbled by the Cratchits joy at their small meal, and deciding to eat with Fred at the end, perhaps Dickens is showing us Scrooge is recognising the way food transcends class status, and its role, particularly at Xmas, as a unifying force for happiness.

6. A Christmas Carol – Love and Society
Attitude not only to Cratchits and family, but to strangers, passers by. The sense that one of society’s cornerstones is kindness and good manners is missing at the start – ‘Nobody ever stopped him in the street…but it was the very thing he liked’ .
By the end ‘Scrooge regarded everyone with a delighted smile’ but it is the reciprocation of this that warms his heart the most – ‘Good morning Sir! Merry Xmas! was the blithest sound!’
Why was he like this at the start? Perhaps for Self-protection –After Belle, he has become so embittered with being a victim of the hypocrisy of life (Told not to be poor/Challenged and deserted for being rich) that he has closed himself off to any form of love from anywhere.
By the end , he is open, vulnerable, humble (as anyone needs to be to be loved) when he attends Fred’s Xmas dinner ‘Will you have me?’ Also this is the first time he asserts his identity (just like Hamlet in Act 5 who has settled on his identity/purpose) – ‘It is I, your uncle Scrooge’ at the end – the transformation is complete; his identity is confirmed.

8. A Christmas Carol - Funerals
At Marley’s funeral, Scrooge abhorrently conducts a business deal. (No regard for social etiquette)
In Stave 4, when he hears people discussing the funeral of an unnnamed man and only planning to attend if there is a free dinner, not to mention the trading of the dead man’s belongings ‘Scrooge listened to this dialogue in horror’ –He has become able to empathise with how such behaviour is viewed from another’s perspective.

10. A Christmas Carol - Madness
Scrooge talks in disbelief of how Bob on his low salary can ‘talk of a merry Xmas – I’ll retire to Bedlam’ (First asylum for the mentally ill – opened in the 14th century)
By the end –the roles are reversed and Bob views Scrooge’s crazy behaviour with disbelief – ‘He had a momentary idea of knocking Scrooge down, and calling to the people for help and a strait waistcoat!’

12. A Christmas Carol - Weather
Pathetic fallacy is used powerfully by Dickens – ‘The fog and darkness thickened… foggier yet, and colder’
By the end – ‘No fog, no mist; clear, bright, jovial, stirring cold… Golden sunlight’
Character has perhaps been ‘stirred’ emotionally -moved to change. No-one minds a bit of cold if it is a sunny day! – Unlike the seemingly endless, hyperbolic escalation of dark coldness at the start, Scrooge is braced for the cold and ready for his new life ahead by the end.
Interesting what is ‘golden’ here is the sunlight –a positive, not the negative ‘golden idol’ that he was accused of worshipping by Belle. His future will still be ‘golden’ materially but there is evidence he will share considerably more of his wealth around in the future. ‘A great many backpayments are included in’ his donation to the charity collectors.

14. A Christmas Carol – Changing reaction to the Ghosts
Marley – ‘’Couldn’t I take them all at once?’ ‘more of gravy than the grave’ –DETACHED- joking, cynical. Then ‘Hum…’ but stops at the first syllable. Hint the cynicism is starting to go even at end of 1st ghost.
Xmas Past –Final embers of cynicism fade (‘A night of sleep would be more conducive’) but then is DEEPLY DISTRESSED by revelations ‘lip is trembling’ ‘Wept’ ‘ uneasy’ – But with Fan – it’s the Ghost that points out the relation to Fred. It’s only in the next scene with Fezziwig where learning/recognition occurs ‘ I should like to say a word to my clerk’
Xmas present –DEFERENTIAL, humbled, can’t make eye contact- ‘Though spirit’s eyes were kind, he did not like to meet them’
Xmas Future –DESPERATE - Frustrated that the spirit won’t speak, and starts commanding him to ‘lead on’

15. Romeo and Juliet

17. Capulet’s changing desire to fight
Act 1:1 Wants to fight ‘ My long sword, ho!’
Act 1:5 Has listened to the Prince / Doesn’t want to fight. To Tybalt- ‘You’ll make a mutiny among my guests’.
Act 3:5 Ready to attack daughter. ‘My fingers itch’
Act 4:5 Destroyed by death of daughter. ‘With my child, my joys are buried’
Act 5:3 Recognises what fighting has caused ‘O brother Montague, give me thy hand’

19. The Prince and his personal trauma
Act 1:1 ‘ Your lives shall pay the forfeit of the peace’ –threat to the warring families
Act 3:1 ‘Immediately we do exile him hence…My blood for your rude brawls doth lie-a-bleeding’ – Is the Prince’s relation to Mercutio the reason for his revised punishment?
Act 5:3 –’See what a scourge is laid upon your hate… I have lost a brace of kinsmen’ (Paris and Mercutio) – His angry rhetoric prompts the two families to reconcile.
Perhaps he never needed to implement the law as the law of fate did that for him ‘All are punished’ (without him lifting a finger!)

21. The use of hyperbolic profound farewells from Juliet
Act 2:3 After balcony scene ‘Parting is such sweet sorrow, that I shall say good night till it be morrow’
Act 2:5 Juliet on receiving news of wedding plans- ‘Hie to high fortune! Honest Nurse, farewell.’
Act 3:5 After wedding night -‘Art thou gone so, love, lord, ay husband, friend? I must hear from thee every day in the hour’
Act 4:2 Juliet’s final farewell to caring father figure -Friar. ‘Love give me strength…farewell, dear Father’
Act 4:3 Juliet’s final farewell to Mother. ‘God knows when we shall meet again!’
Act 5:3 Juliet’s death –Ironic that the final farewell is the simplest -‘Then I’ll be brief. O happy dagger.

23. Juliet’s changing obedience/loyalty
Act 1:3 -Juliet’s 2nd line in the whole play – loyal, obedient girl -‘Madam I am here. What is your will?’
Act 2:3 –Juliet’s willingness to be loyal to Romeo –’I’ll follow thee my Lord throughout the world’
Act 3:5 – Juliet’s disloyalty to Tybalt –’That one word Banished hath slain ten thousand Tybalts’
Act 3:5 – Juliet’s loyalty to her husband, Romeo despite onslaught from father. ‘Proud can I never be of what I hate,’
Act 4:2 – Disloyal to father –lying ‘I have learnt me to repent the sin of disobedient opposition’

25. Mercutio’s rude, teenage, misogynistic humour
Act 2:1 –After the party, Mercutio is trying to find where Romeo is hiding by antagonising him- ‘ Twould anger him to raise a spirit in his mistress’ circle…letting it there stand’ –It would make him mad if I conjured up someone else to have sex with Rosaline!
Act 2:1 – ‘O Romeo, that she were, that she were an open-arse’ (An open-arse was the name for a medlar fruit that resembled a vagina)
Act 2:4 –To the Nurse- ‘The bawdy hand of the dial is now upon the prick of noon.’
Act 3:1 –To Tybalt who has politely come looking for Romeo – ‘Could you not take some occasion without giving?’
Act 3:5 –To Romeo as he dies - ‘Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man’ – Death of innuendo comedy –move into bad puns / Beginning of Tragedy

26. Your turn!
Can you make any structural links between different points in Blood Brothers or An Inspector Calls?