A Christmas Carol

Victorian society frequently tried to distinguish between the deserving and the undeserving poor. For example, although the workhouses were miserable and dehumanizing for everyone, the elderly or disabled received better rations than those considered “able-bodied.” Part of the problem was that the Victorians struggled to understand the nature of poverty—whether it was a result of social and economic conditions beyond one’s control (e.g., the upheaval of industrialization) or the effect of a person’s character. One theory was that God ordained social position, so people should be content with their lot and not try to rise above it. Another theory went that bad luck was a sign of God’s condemnation, so wealth was evidence of virtue, and poverty was evidence of bad character—a theory no doubt supported by the fact that the poor were much more likely to steal food than the wealthy. As science advanced, similar ideas attached themselves to the theory of evolution; what would eventually become known as “social Darwinism” maintained that “survival of the fittest” applied not only to the natural world but to human society and that those living in poverty were “unfit.”

Scrooge certainly begins the novel dismissing the poor as unworthy of aid. When approached for charity, he first objects that he doesn’t wish to “make idle people merry” and then implies that society would be better off if such people were dead (6). His remark about “decreas[ing] the surplus population” refers to the theories of the economist Thomas Malthus (6), who argued that population growth tends to outstrip resource production, causing poverty until famine, disease, or another disaster “corrects” the imbalance. Like Scrooge, proponents of this theory generally opposed private charity and/or government welfare on the grounds that it merely exacerbated the problem, alleviating poverty just enough to encourage further population growth.

Dickens largely blamed ignorance for the Victorians’ condemnation of the poor. The upper economic classes were isolated from the lower and had no intimate understanding of their lives, At its root, A Christmas Carol—like many of his works—is Dickens’s attempt to combat ignorance by introducing the middle and upper classes to the foreign world of those beneath them on the economic ladder. Besides depicting the physical realities of poverty, the novel aims to show the moral nature of it via the allegorical figures “Ignorance” and “Want.” Personified as street urchins, these characters are not just impoverished but “wolfish.” However, the narrator is clear that their viciousness is the symptom of their condition rather than its cause: “Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing” (49). The implication is that ignoring the misery of the lower classes (or writing it off as the result of bad character) will only result in further degradation.