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Category: A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

A man and woman surrounded by six children, who are examining gifts being unpacked from a large hamper. The father holds a turkey by the feet.

Scrooge’s Prize Turkey: Victorian Christmas Foodways in Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol”

Posted by: Stephen Winick

This post is part of an occasional series about ethnography and folklore in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.  Find the whole series here! In our last look at the foodways of Dickens’s classic story A Christmas Carol, we examined the joy the Cratchits take in their small but serviceable Christmas goose, as Scrooge and the Ghost …

Eight people sit around a table. At one end, a woman carves a goose.

Cooking the Cratchits’ Goose: Urban Foodways in Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol”

Posted by: Stephen Winick

Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol reveals an interesting fact about Victorian London: many working class people lacked cooking facilities, with only a hearth fire in their homes. In this post, we'll see some of their strategies for cooking a meal by looking at the Cratchits, the only working class family depicted in the book in a detailed way. We'll also look beyond the Cratchits to other London families in the same boat, and show how Dickens expresses social and political ideas about foodways through Scrooge and his interactions.

Illustration of a man in a chair by a fireplace interacting with a standing ghost

What Scrooge Ate on Christmas Eve: Folk Belief, Folk Medicine, and Foodways in Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol”

Posted by: Stephen Winick

In this post, we read segments of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol ethnographically, exploring the aspects of cultural context that stand out as different, surprising, and in need of explanation. In particular, this year we'll examine unusual aspects of Dickensian foodways. In this first post, we'll find out how to determine what Scrooge ate on Christmas Eve, and discuss supernatural belief and folk medicine along the way.

More About the Business of Scrooge and Marley: an Ethnographic Approach

Posted by: Stephen Winick

A few years ago, my esteemed colleague Ellen Terrell wrote an excellent blog post at Inside Adams, examining from a business perspective the firm of Scrooge and Marley, the fictional business at the center of Charles Dickens’s classic work of Christmas literature, A Christmas Carol. I thought I would see what an ethnographic perspective could …