Dickens had encountered that narrative trope in the stories written by the Lowell mill girls, who typically published either anonymously or under pseudonyms like “Dorothea” or “M.” In one anonymous story called “A Visit from Hope,” the narrator is “seated by the expiring embers of a wood fire” at midnight, when a ghost, an old man with “thin white locks,” appears before him. The ghost takes the narrator back to scenes from his youth, and afterward the narrator promises to “endeavor to profit by the advice he gave me.” Similarly, in “A Christmas Carol,” Scrooge is sitting beside “a very low fire indeed” when Marley’s ghost appears before him. And, later, after Scrooge has been visited by the ghosts of Christmases Past, Present, and Future, he promises, “The spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach.”
Melody Velasco on 21 Jun 10NewsTrust.net helps people find good journalism online. Each lesson takes about 45 minutes. During that time, we invite you and your students to read a work of journalism (news or opinion) and evaluate it for journalistic quality using NewsTrust review tools. Students will be asked to rate that story on a variety of criteria, such as: facts, fairness and sourcing (news); insights, information and style (opinion).
