http://192.168.2.6/english/1117/圣诞传奇.rm

New York City, 1820.

Within a space of a generation, New York had gone from a bad water port town to the center of American commerce. Great wealth came to a few during these years and moderated livings into the burgeoning middle class. But the industrial revolution had also created a class of the unemployed and unconnected whose very existence threatened the cozy world of New York’s middle round. This was never more clear than a Christmas time.

Class conflict was emerging, with the early stages of industry capitalism, and so what had previously just have an edge of manners, a little bit of trick but much more good will. Much more trick, now changed and the matters became increasingly obvious and increasingly serious. So that by the 1820s, the Christmas season in cities like New York was really a time of gang rioting, a really very very nasty scene. So nasty in fact that in the year of 1828 the New York City Council for the first time instituted the professional police force for the city as a direct result of a particular savage Christmas Season riot the year before.

New York’s upper class was worried. So worried that a few of them set out to change the way the holiday was celebrated. Washington Irving was America’s bestselling novelist and in 1890 he used his expertise to write Bliss Bridge Hall, an enormously popular series of stories about Christmas at an imaginary English-manner house. Here the classes mingled effortlessly esquires welcomed friendly and grateful presents into their homes. And in 1843, England’s most famous writer Charles Dickens tackled the Christmas problem with “A Christmas Carol.” It was a bestseller in London and the America. And the lessons of the story struck a powerful call on both sides of the Atlantic.

Christmas Carol, I think, showed the victories what could be the huge sense of meaning of Christmas. In the society in which was quite peace but itself * but which is never the last, * fears in the quality about too materialism, about perhaps just too much rapid changes.

There had been countless treatment of this Christmas classic, some in print and some on screen. This television version is from 1958. But the themes are straight out of the 19 century.

* ,you want all day * supposed present.
Quite convenient, sir.
It’s not convenient.
But it’s only one day in the year, sir.
Poor excuse to pick the pocket of your employer every 25th of December.
I think the character * was scrunched, taught a very important lesson to middle class people.

Christmas, nonsense. Humble.

Because the Christmas season presented the real problem. what do we owe to the different people, in our world. What do we owe to our families, what do we owe to employees, what we owe, what do we owe to the unanimous poor.