There’s a reason Dickens’ Christmas Carol is a perennial festive favourite, says A V Deggar – the Malthusian ideas of Scrooge are still with us
“Marley was dead: to begin with” – the first sentence of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, a defining tale of transformation and redemption in Western literature.
On Christmas Eve, ghostly apparitions confront the miser and misanthrope, Ebenezer Scrooge, with the mistakes of his past, the misdeeds of his present, and his own mortality. So shocked is he by the ramifications of his conduct, that on Christmas Day morning, he emerges into the world a changed character, reformed by his journey through actions and consequences.
A seam that runs thick in A Christmas Carol and many of Dickens’s works is the socioeconomic inequality of the time – something Dickens himself experienced when his father was sent to debtor’s prison and he was forced to work ten-hour days in a shoe polish factory, at the age of just 12.
Dickens was born in 1812, a century after Thomas Newcomen “first drove a piston through the agency of steam and created the world’s first steam engine.” It was also the year that Parliament passed The Destruction of Stocking Frames, etc. Act 1812, a law making the destruction of mechanised looms punishable by death.
The Industrial Revolution would reweave British society at a speed and in a manner that would make its faults more visible – poverty would migrate from fields to factories, mines to mills. Villages would empty as towns and cities began to fill and brim over, connected by soot-covered steam trains.
Dickens’s London, a main protagonist in many of his works, had doubled in size from 1760 to 1815. Topping 1.4m inhabitants, it had become the most populous city in the world. By the time of his death in 1870, it would have doubled again. Like cities all over the UK, 18th-century infrastructure buckled under 19th-century population demand. Districts became slums. Demand for lodging became so expensive that many were forced into itinerant indigence, drifting from place to place with no fixed abode.
Labour rights were largely non-existent. Children toiled alongside their parents from the age of 10 and younger – in the 1851 census of England and Wales, a third of boys and a fifth of girls between the ages of 10–14 were part of the workforce. Healthcare was for the rich, and even then, pre-germ theory medicine was inadequate. Disease was common – average life expectancy hovered around 40 years of age. Four major cholera outbreaks would hit the capital in Dickens’s lifetime, killing tens of thousands. In the year A Christmas Carol went to press, only two-thirds of men in England, and half the women, were literate.
When we read or hear about “Dickensian conditions” it is these stark realities that come to the fore, with the well-to-do Scrooges of the world living cheek-by-jowl with the impoverished Cratchits. Nearly two centuries later, A Christmas Carol has sinister echoes in our present day.
Health, Housing, Hierarchy
The recent, shocking death of toddler, Awaab Ishak, from a respiratory condition caused by the unsafe state of his home, made national headline news in the UK. Even the coroner in the case asked the question: “How in the UK in 2020 does a two-year-old child die as a result of exposure to mould?”
In South East London, residents of a tower block on Regina Road began complaining about leaking in their flats in 2019. By 2021, the state of disrepair was so hazardous that it led Polly Neate, the CEO of the UK’s biggest housing charity, Shelter, to declare: “There isn’t really any possible way that those properties are fit for human habitation.”
According to the latest English Housing Survey, 3.4m occupied dwellings, or 14% of homes, did not meet the Decent Homes Standard – which includes “a reasonable degree of thermal comfort”, “a reasonable state of repair”, and have “reasonably modern facilities and services.”
“Dickensian diseases” have gained a foothold in 21st century Britain, including whooping cough and scarlet fever, while poliovirus was detected in London sewage, causing the UK Health Security Agency to declare a national incident. An outbreak of 70 cases of diphtheria at the overcrowded Manston migrant processing centre in Kent “had put asylum seekers and potentially hotel workers at avoidable and preventable risk.”
This is all happening at a time when the rich are getting richer, and the life chances of the poor are plummeting.
According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 14.5m people – a fifth of the UK population – are living in poverty, including almost one in three children. The New Economics Foundation estimates that 30.6m Britons will be unable to afford the cost of essentials by 2024, and the National Literacy Trust states that some 8.5m adults in the UK have functional literacy problems, while the likelihood of school buildings collapsing, has been raised to “critical – very likely.”
All of this exists in a country where the number of billionaires has increased by 20% since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, British private schools benefit from tax exemptions to the tune of £3bn per annum, and life expectancy between wealthy and deprived areas differs by as much as 27 years.
Today, as in Dickens’s time, the root of this punishing disparity, is choice.
Austerity, Malthus and Redemption
Before his encounter with the ghost of his former business partner, Jacob Marley, Ebenezer Scrooge is visited at his counting house by two benefactors, who ask if he would like to give a donation for the destitute at Christmas. The penny pincher responds: “I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry.” Scrooge argues that prisons and workhouses are the only institutions he supports for dealing with the poor,