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The price of coal
At Christmas, ALISON BANVILLE is reminded of the plight of miners, those giant figures of our class history here in Britain, who still live with immense danger and suffering around the world

THE Christmas season has a special connection to miners for me. It all began years ago when I first read Charles Dickens’s classic, A Christmas Carol, and noticed the poignant place mineworkers have in the story.

And I was very pleased to discover that the National Coal Mining Museum has given prominence to this on their website with a page devoted to Voices in the Coalshed, a volunteer project exploring “the language and literature inspired by coalmining.”

“At one point,” they explain, “the Ghost of Christmas Present takes Scrooge to “a bleak and desert moor where monstrous masses of rude stone were cast about as though it were the burial place of giants.” A horrified Scrooge is told that this is, “a place where miners live, who labour in the bowels of the earth.”

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