SOURCE: “A Christmas Carol Criticizes England's Economic System,” in Reading on Charles Dickens, edited by Clarice Swisher, The Greenhaven Press, 1998, pp. 86–93.

In the following excerpt from a 1952 article published in the American Scholar, Johnson deems Dickens's novella as a biting critique of nineteenth-century England's economic system.

Everyone knows Dickens's Christmas Carol for its colorful painting of a rosy fireside good cheer and warmth of feeling, made all the more vivid by the contrasting chill wintry darkness in which its radiant scenes are framed. Most readers realize too how characteristic of all Dickens's sentiments about the Christmas season are the laughter and tenderness and jollity he poured into the Carol. What is not so widely understood is that it was also consistently and deliberately created as a critical blast against the very rationale of industrialism and its assumptions about the organizing principles of society. It is an attack upon...