Monday 30 October 2017

In A Christmas Carol, give an example of a list and a long sentence used by Charles Dickens.

Your request made me smile because Charles Dickens is renowned for the parallelism that he uses in “lists” and “long sentences.”  Parallelism, of course, is the use of a grammatical structure again and again in the same sentence.  Let us look at one example of Dickens’ parallelism in a list and then in a long sentence.  Charles Dickens often uses lists to further the description of a character.  In this case, the list describes Scrooge before his transformation:


Oh! but he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! 



Here Dickens’ uses parallelism especially in the words “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching.”  This description furthers the simple idea of Scrooge being an “old sinner” and suggests a degree of intensity that the reader could not understand as well without the list.


In regards to Dickens’ use of the “long sentence,” let us take an example from after Scrooge’s transformation:



The chuckle with which he said this, and the chuckle with which he paid for the Turkey, and the chuckle with which he paid for the cab, and the chuckle with which he recompensed the boy, were only to be exceeded by the chuckle with which he sat down breathless in his chair again, and chuckled till he cried.



Again we have the description of a character (the same character, in fact) furthered by the use of parallelism.  In this case, the parallel structure of this sentence gives it multiple subjects.  Dickens decides to list each individual laugh instead of simply indicating that Scrooge “chuckles” a lot.  The irony in regards to your question is that the long sentence again includes a list.  This time, Dickens lists Scrooge’s laughs to show his transformation from miserliness to mirth. 

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