With Christmas fast approaching, many people will be dusting off their copies of the Charles Dickens classic, A Christmas Carol. While we know the classic tale to be about the Golden Rule and keeping Christmas traditions, few realize it was a biting and timely political piece meant to shed light on a serious problem in London society.
London of the 1840s was in the mist of the industrial revolution which had begun at the end of the 18th century. Textile mills, steam engines, and other innovations allowed England to import and exports goods as never before, making business owners and enterprising inventors extremely rich. However, this same industrial age had created a vast poverty class, leaving thousands unemployed and with only the option of working in “poor houses” which were government run building where poor families would go to live and do manual labor. In his documentary series on Britain, Author Simon Schama explained, “Workhouses had always been deliberately designed to be as much like prisons as possible, to deter anyone with who had slightest chance at a job.” Thus, Scrooge, the old money-lender symbolizing the indifferent upper class, facetiously inquires in the first chapter of A Christmas Carol, “Are there no workhouses? Are there no prisons?”
If anything could have been worse than life in a poorhouse, it would be life in a factory. An American observer in the city of Manchester during this time wrote of the people “Wretched, defrauded, oppressed, crushed human nature lying in bleeding fragments.” Worse yet was the widespread use of child labor. Often the children would be told a retrieve pieces of cotton from underneath moving machinery where one brief slip could crush their arm.
Dickens himself, visited Manchester and elsewhere, and was shocked by the poverty he saw. Dickens’s father had been forced into a debtors prison, and as a young boy Charles had to work in a shoe polish factory. As Dickens remembered, wages were horribly low and the factory teemed with rats. The experience left Dickens with deep bitterness toward his parents and a great sympathy for the lower classes. Then in 1842, the Second Report of the Children's Employment Commission was published, which showed the growing problem of child labor in England. Dickens wanted to write a response to this in form of a political pamphlet, but put it off.
Finally in December 1843, he published A Christmas Carol. In his story, Scrooge came to represent everyone in the upper class who blatantly ignored the conditions of the poor and only made money for themselves. Again and Again Scrooge is told how he should use his money for good, but the direct appeal to help the poor comes in form of a cold warning when the Spirit of Christmas Present lifts his robe to expose two poor children. “They are Man’s,” he says, “This boy is Ignorance. The girl is Want. Beware them both, and all their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that which is written is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it.” Dickens was saying that the poor and the problems they faced would continue to get worse unless addressed, and could lead to the overthrow the wealthy class. Dickens struck one last chord at the end of the story when Scrooge sees that his house has been ransacked and that he has died alone without friends. To every well bred Englishman, the thought that they would not be liked, or at very least respected at the time of their death, was a terrifying thought.
Ultimately, Dickens wanted greater attention for the poor, and for them to be provided with more opportunities through moral changes in society and greater financial support.
Dickens would not be the last one to focus on the plight of the poor. Four years later Elizabeth Gaskell would once again plunge the British readers into the slums of England in her novel Mary Barton. The book focused on two poor families in Manchester who had to work in factories and watch their children starve. Gaskell brought into sharp contrast, and Schama believed even more so the Dickens, the great divide between the rich and poor. Gaskell’s main point was that poor people cared little about the luxuries of the upper class and only wanted to see their children fed. In one scene, she showed how a family’s life depended on what a wealthy character considered loose change.
That same year German writer Karl Marx published his Communist Manifesto and echoed what Dickens and Gaskell had said when he wrote, “Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie [wealthy class] and Proletariat [lower class].” Marx also wrote, “Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of [laborers] crowded into the factory are [organized] like solders.” Here the worker became more a part of the machinery than a man. Up to this point Marx reflected the writing of the Dickens and Gaskell, but where Dickens and Gaskell believed that society should voluntarily take care of the poor by admitting their existence, Marx thought that compromise with upper class was pointless and that only true solution was to mount a violent overthrow of the government.
So while A Christmas Carol emphasizes a broad theme of Christian charity in keeping with Christmas traditions, it should be remembered that it was also part of a powerful series of books that, for the first time, brutally focused on the plight of the poor and demanded serious changes in how the privileged viewed their responsibilities to society.
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