A Man Reclaimed

The motion: “Scrooge's redemption is convincing.”

Your opponent: Charles Dickens · Assessment objectives: AO1, AO2, AO3

One night, three ghosts, a lifetime reversed. Dickens will tell you exactly how he engineered it — and dare you to call it cheap.

What you are asked to argue

Argue for or against. Dickens will accept a charge of sentimentality only if you can show where the structure fails.

The five-stave structure and what each stave does
The Ghost of Christmas Past: Fezziwig, Belle, the schoolroom
Ignorance and Want
1843 context: the Poor Laws, Malthus, the Ragged Schools (AO3 on this specification)
The novella's form — 'stave' rather than 'chapter', and why

Disagreeing with the figure is not an error. Any of these can score full marks if argued well:

That the redemption is convincing as allegory and unconvincing as psychology, and the book is allegory
That the Past stave makes it convincing and the Future stave makes it coerced
That the conversion is deliberately abrupt because Dickens wants the reader's own conversion to be equally possible

Wrong: AO3 on this specification means writing a paragraph of Victorian history.
The correction: It rewards ideas and context that illuminate the text. History that does not change a reading of a line earns little.
Wrong: The ghosts are the story's supernatural decoration.
The correction: Each ghost is a method: memory, observation and fear, applied in that order because that is the order in which a man can be changed.

A judgement about the redemption's plausibility argued from the five-stave structure, with context that changes a reading.

Read the life before you argue with it — the case you are about to meet was built by a real person, over a real career:

The life of Charles Dickens — The Inimitable · Chronicler of London · Novelist · 1812–1870

Prepare for this debate → — the motion, the rounds and the marking descriptors, then the debate itself. Free, no account needed.