SAT写作经典例子之Charles Dickens_SAT写作

SAT写作经典例子之Charles Dickens

　　In 1842, Dickens and his wife made his first trip to the United States and Canada. At this time Georgina Hogarth, another sister of Catherine, joined the Dickens household, now living at Devonshire Terrace, Marylebone, to care for the young family they had left behind. She remained with them as housekeeper, organiser, adviser and friend until Dickenss death in 1870.

　　Sketch of Dickens in 1842 during American Tour.

　　Sketch of Dickenss sister Fanny, bottom leftHe described his impressions in a travelogue entitled American Notes for General Circulation. Some of the episodes in Martin Chuzzlewit also drew on these first-hand experiences. Dickens includes in Notes a powerful condemnation of slavery, which he had attacked as early as The Pickwick Papers, correlating the emancipation of the poor in England with the abolition of slavery abroad. During his visit, Dickens spent a month in New York City, giving lectures and raising the question of international copyright laws and the pirating of his work in America. He persuaded twenty five writers, headed by Washington Irving to sign a petition for him to take to congress, but the press were generally hostile to this saying that he should be grateful for his popularity and that it was mercenary to complain about his work being pirated.

　　In the early 1840s Dickens showed an interest in Unitarian Christianity, although he never strayed from his attachment to popular lay Anglicanism. Soon after his return to England, Dickens began work on the first of his Christmas stories, A Christmas Carol, written in 1843, which was followed by The Chimes in 1844 and The Cricket on the Hearth in 1845. Of these A Christmas Carol was most popular and, tapping in to an old tradition, did much promote a renewed enthusiasm for the joys of Christmas in Britain and America. The seeds for the story were planted in Dickenss mind during a trip to Manchester to witness conditions of the manufacturing workers there. This, along with scenes he had recently witnessed at the Field Lane Ragged School, caused Dickens to resolve to strike a sledge hammer blow for the poor. As the idea for the story took shape and the writing began in earnest, Dickens became engrossed in the book. He wrote that as the tale unfolded he wept and laughed, and wept again as he walked about the black streets of London fifteen or twenty miles many a night when all sober folks had gone to bed.