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Big-ideas-in-lit texts.docx. A Christmas Carol: A secular or religious text? – CLiC Fiction. In this post, Mary Hind-Portley (@Lit_Liverbird) explains how she teaches Dickens’s Christmas Carol with a focus on its religious elements. The post is based on Mary’s remote CPD presentation and a previous blogpost for @LitdriveUK ( The full set of Mary’s slides shown throughout the post is available here [PDF, 6.1MB]. You can follow Mary on her teaching blog, isthereanythinglefttosay.wordpress.com. This post is the first teaching-focused contribution to our BMI Lockdown Life series in collaboration with the Birmingham & Midland Institute.

Join the conversation with #BMILockDownLife on Twitter. As teachers our subsequent encounters with a set text over time are a privilege; with each reading deepening our understanding, new ideas emerging and the text itself revealing greater complexity. Part of this context is Dickens’ own sense of religion and the influence of Christianity in 19th century England. Stave I consider his ways and actions. Stave II Stave III Stave V. Teaching 'A Christmas Carol'. Illustrated by Ronald Searle, in Life Magazine, 1960. Reading a classic novella like ‘A Christmas Carol’ is tricky for our teenage students. Yes, they have likely heard of Scrooge and seen a film adaptation or three, but when faced with the actual text and the world of the story, with its antiquated social context and complex vocabulary, it proves a difficult challenge. After last teaching ‘A Christmas Carol’ seven years ago, I have the good luck to return to it this year.

As I re-read the famous ghost story parable, text marking it ready for teaching, my young daughter commented how the words made the story nearly inscrutable to her (“I don’t understand – it’s really hard” were her precise words). It is easy to recognise many of the more challenging terms in the novella, but when you take time to mark the text to find the difficult language you recognise the linguistic barriers students face. (The original hand written opening page of ‘A Christmas Carol’) Related. English Unit: Famous Authors and Books. GCSE / National 5 English Literature Teacher Resources - BBC Teach. Welcome to DJO. Charles Dickens – author of A Christmas Carol. Biography Charles Dickens is perhaps as famous today as he was in his lifetime, the author of 15 novels, five novellas, and countless stories and essays, he also generously promoted the careers of other novelists in his weekly journals, and concerned himself with social issues.

He excelled in writing about London settings and grotesque and comic characters (Uriah Heep and Fagin, Miss Havisham and Scrooge, the Artful Dodger and Sam Weller). He was born in Portsmouth on 7 February 1812, son of John Dickens, a feckless and improvident navy clerk with a great love for literature, and his wife Elizabeth: Charles drew an ironically affectionate portrait of them in Mr and Mrs Micawber (David Copperfield).

A happy childhood in Chatham, during which he read voraciously, ended with a move to London in 1822. Family poverty meant the young Charles had to earn money, and he spent a humiliating year labelling bottles in a blacking factory; during this period, his father was imprisoned for debt.