Key Quote
“"This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both... but most of all beware this boy"”
Ghost of Christmas Present · Stave 3
Focus: “Ignorance”
The Spirit reveals two emaciated children hiding beneath his robes — Ignorance and Want — Dickens' most direct allegorical warning that society's neglect of the poor will destroy it.
Technique 1 — PERSONIFICATION / ALLEGORY
Dickens personifies (gives human form to) abstract social problems as starving children — transforming statistics about poverty into visceral, emotional images. Ignorance and Want are not merely concepts but suffering beings, making it impossible for the reader to dismiss them as abstract policy issues. This allegorical technique forces empathetic engagement (emotional connection through shared feeling).
The children are described as 'wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable' — a polysyndetic (using multiple conjunctions) catalogue of horror. Yet they are children: innocent victims of society's failure. This juxtaposition of childhood innocence with social degradation is Dickens' most powerful rhetorical weapon.
Key Words
RAD — STAGNATE
Ignorance and Want represent societal stagnation on a massive scale: these children are the product of a system that refuses to change. Their existence is not accidental but systemic (produced by the structures of society itself). The Spirit's warning — 'most of all beware this boy' — suggests that ignorance is more dangerous than poverty, because an uneducated populace cannot advocate for change.
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Technique 2 — DIRECT AUTHORIAL POLEMIC
This moment breaks the novella's narrative fiction and becomes polemic (a forceful argument against something): Dickens speaks directly to Victorian society through the Spirit's voice. The imperative 'Beware' transforms the story from entertainment into prophecy (a prediction of future consequences) — if society does not address poverty and ignorance, destruction will follow.
The prioritisation — 'most of all beware this boy' — reveals Dickens' thesis (central argument): education is the solution to poverty. Ignorance perpetuates Want; knowledge enables escape. This positions the novella as an argument for social reform, specifically expanded access to education for the poor.
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Context (AO3)
EDUCATION & THE RAGGED SCHOOLS
In 1843, only wealthy children received education. Ragged Schools — free schools for the destitute — were chronically underfunded. Dickens visited and supported these schools, and Ignorance is a direct indictment of a society that denied education to its poorest citizens. Universal state education would not arrive until the 1870 Education Act, nearly three decades later.
THE 'TWO NATIONS'
Benjamin Disraeli described Victorian Britain as 'Two Nations' — the rich and the poor — 'between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy.' Dickens dramatises this divide: Ignorance and Want are hidden beneath the Spirit's robes, invisible to comfortable society. The novella's purpose is to make this hidden suffering visible and unavoidable for the middle-class reader.
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WOW — STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE (Galtung)
Johan Galtung's concept of structural violence describes harm that is embedded in social systems rather than inflicted by individuals — poverty, lack of education, and preventable disease are forms of violence even without a visible aggressor. Dickens anticipates this concept: Ignorance and Want are not the fault of any single person but of a society structured to exclude the poor from opportunity. The novella's power lies in making structural violence personal — by showing children, Dickens forces the reader to recognise that systemic injustice has human victims. His didactic (teaching a moral lesson) purpose is not merely to change individual hearts but to indict the entire system that produces these children.
Key Words