Charles Dickens's new Christmas story. Mrs. Lirriper's lodgings ..

Because of his father's gregariousness, his childhood also included a convivial acquaintance with all and sundry from the lower-middle and working classes. This social apprenticeship surely did fuel Dickens's lifelong fellow feeling with the humble and the downtrodden, and it led to his constant appeals for sympathetic understanding of the poor, which he molded around New Testament pieties. His annual Christmas stories, a tradition begun in 1843 with "A Christmas Carol," express these Christian principles of forgiveness, generosity, and brotherly love most directly. While Dickens did not, as some have claimed, «invent» the modern rituals of Christmas, he did much to promote the emerging Victorian sense of Christmas as a great festival of social goodwill, and to identify himself with it. On the most superficial level, the novels feature an incessant conflict between good and evil, the latter associated primarily with the lack of feeling-and also the stupidity-that follow from refusals of human brotherhood. Coupling the virtues of charity to the power of moral intelligence, Dickens was able to articulate a populism that combined an exuberant faith in the best potentials of humankind with an acute and unflinching recognition of its worst ...»