Destitution was a great concern in England when Charles Dickens penned A Christmas Carol (1843). Twin shocks — the industrial revolution and rapid urbanization — caused the standard of living of the lower classes temporarily and visibly to decline in the 2nd quarter of the 19th century. Reformers, Utopian Socialists, communist revolutionaries (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels), and Dickens took notice.

Historians, hampered by inadequate economic data, debate inconclusively whether real wages rose or fell. However, anthropometric evidence, which captures the impact of the total historical environment on the human body, paints a clear, bleak picture. 

Consider, for example, average heights of British youths at age fifteen. Between 1820 and 1850, average height of working-class 15-year-olds decreased by two inches, while height of upper-class 15-year-olds held steady. In 1843, working-class 15-year-olds were seven inches shorter than upper-class 15-year-olds. Here is a sketch of broader impacts of “the ‘Hungry Forties’ and perhaps even hungrier thirties”:

For those already malnourished by poverty […], cold, polluted water, foetid air and lack of living space must have often been intolerable; their nutritional status, as the heights of the children of the Marine Society from the slums and rookeries of London so eloquently show, was appalling. […] even if there were substantial gains in real incomes or in real wages for the working class in the 2nd quarter of the 19th century, these were more than outweighed by other features of the environment — urbanisation, disease, diet and possibly work intensity. […] such effects can be felt in the very long-term, affecting the life and death chances of the children of the 1830s and 1840s as they grew into adulthood and old age. […] it was only by the end of the 19th century that improvements in real wages, and in public health and other sanitary measures, compensated the British working class for the horrors of urban and industrial life which they had borne in the 2nd quarter of the century. —  Roderick Floud et al., Height, health, and history: Nutritional status in the United Kingdom, 1750-1980 (Cambridge U. Press, 1990), Figure 4.12 at p. 185; and pp. 300, 305, & 319.

Material well-being is not the sum of happiness. Presumably many among the destitute preferred lively Dickensian urban distress and the satanic mill to more salubrious life on the farm. Nonetheless, urban poverty, so concentrated and visible, demanded remedy.

 

Scrooge against Charity

A memorable passage in A Christmas Carol presents a sharp contrast of attitudes about seasonal charity for the poor. A gentleman makes a plea to Ebenezer Scrooge:

At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge,” said the gentleman, taking up a pen, “it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.

Scrooge cross-examines the gentleman and invokes extant purpose-built public institutions. The exchange reveals the system’s punitive dimension, which Scrooge endorses:

“Are there no prisons?” asked Scrooge.

“Plenty of prisons,” said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.

“And the Union workhouses?” demanded Scrooge. “Are they still in operation?”

“They are. Still,” returned the gentleman, “I wish I could say they were not.”

“The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?” said Scrooge.

“Both very busy, sir.”

“Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course,” said Scrooge. “I’m very glad to hear it.”

The gentleman then amplifies the case for a season of giving: 

Under the impression that they scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude,” returned the gentleman, “a few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth. We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down for?

Scrooge firmly rejects the plea, avows a lack of holiday spirit, and explains that he already, so to speak, gave at the office:

“Nothing!” Scrooge replied.

“You wish to be anonymous?”

“I wish to be left alone,” said Scrooge. “Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned—they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there.”

(The system of public relief was funded by “poor rates” (taxes) on property owners.) 

The gentleman then takes a different tack. He notes that the system fails because many among the destitute are either ineligible or unwilling to submit to its severity:

“Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”

The system was founded on the principle of “less eligibility.” To deter individual reliance on the workhouse, conditions therein by design were worse than in the wild. 

Scrooge briefly doubles down with callous, facile (and outdated) Malthusian rhetoric of surplus population: 

“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

However, Scrooge then ends the encounter with a deeper argument. Specialization (social division of labor) entails local knowledge and ignorance of the affairs of remote others; for example, ignorance of the inner motives of the destitute who avoid the system of public relief. Moreover, specialization (disciplined by competition) and non-interference naturally go hand in hand in minding one’s business:

“Besides — excuse me — I don’t know that.”

“But you might know it,” observed the gentleman.

“It’s not my business,” Scrooge returned. “It’s enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people’s. Mine occupies me constantly. Good afternoon, gentlemen!”

Dickens mistrusted political economy and the profit motive. Accordingly, here Scrooge is like a highly selective reader of Adam Smith — one who knows part of The Wealth of Nations, but none of The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

Love, a Casualty of Gain

The watershed moment in Scrooge’s reformation occurs in his two visions of Belle, the maiden to whom he had been engaged when a young man. Scrooge’s supernatural visions via ghosts are metaphors of a troubled mind — nightmares.

In childhood, Ebenezer had been scarred by his father’s lack of sympathy. Despite this wound, he finds love with Belle.

In the first vision, young Ebenezer has embarked on a career in business — and single-minded pursuit of wealth:

There was an eager, greedy, restless motion in the eye, which showed the passion that had taken root, and where the shadow of the growing tree would fall.

Belle, distraught, tells Ebenezer that he loves not her but money — an eclipse she can accept if wealth can grant him what her love would:

“It matters little,” she said, softly. “To you, very little. Another idol has displaced me; and if it can cheer and comfort you in time to come, as I would have tried to do, I have no just cause to grieve.”

“What Idol has displaced you?” he rejoined.

“A golden one.”

Ebenezer protests that “the world” puts him in a double bind. Social norms castigate poverty and pursuit of wealth:

“This is the even-handed dealing of the world!” he said. “There is nothing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!”

Belle ventures a psychological explanation of his love of profit:

“You fear the world too much,” she answered, gently. “All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach. I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one by one, until the master-passion, Gain, engrosses you. Have I not?”

Ebenezer reframes his profit motive as growth in wisdom and declares his love of Belle constant:

“What then?” he retorted. “Even if I have grown so much wiser, what then? I am not changed towards you.” She shook her head. “Am I?”

Belle then extends her analysis of Ebenezer’s self-deception about his change of heart. Gain has seduced him.

“Our contract is an old one. It was made when we were both poor and content to be so, until, in good season, we could improve our worldly fortune by our patient industry. You are changed. When it was made, you were another man.”

“I was a boy,” he said impatiently.

“Your own feeling tells you that you were not what you are,” she returned. “I am. That which promised happiness when we were one in heart, is fraught with misery now that we are two.” [… .]

Belle introduces a counterfactual thought experiment to justify breaking off the engagement. Had they never been engaged would he pursue her now?

“If this had never been between us,” said the girl, looking mildly, but with steadiness, upon him; “tell me, would you seek me out and try to win me now? Ah, no!”

He seemed to yield to the justice of this supposition, in spite of himself. [… .] 

“[…] can even I believe that you would choose a dowerless girl — you who, in your very confidence with her, weigh everything by Gain […]?”

Belle predicts that Ebenezer, mindful of gain, will soon get over rejection, glad to have dodged a bullet: 

“You may—the memory of what is past half makes me hope you will—have pain in this. A very, very brief time, and you will dismiss the recollection of it, gladly, as an unprofitable dream, from which it happened well that you awoke.”

In Scrooge’s second vision, Belle has a husband and a daughter. Their modest home is alive with sundry children at play, benign chaos, love — and great merriment when Belle’s husband enters with an abundance of Christmas gifts. Scrooge winces at the thought that no child will call him father and brighten his life.

Belle’s husband reports that he happened on his errands to glimpse Scrooge bereft at the office:

“Belle,” said the husband, turning to his wife with a smile, “I saw an old friend of yours this afternoon.”

“Who was it?”

“Guess!”

“How can I? Tut, don’t I know?” she added in the same breath, laughing as he laughed. “Mr. Scrooge.”

“Mr. Scrooge it was. I passed his office window; and as it was not shut up, and he had a candle inside, I could scarcely help seeing him. His partner lies upon the point of death, I hear; and there he sat alone. Quite alone in the world, I do believe.”

Scrooge, to his credit, feels not envy but warm sympathy, tinged with existential remorse at the vision of cheer and comfort in Belle’s family and home. The impulse of remorse is to atone. These visions, and other visions, too, move Scrooge to mend his character and, flush with enthusiasm, to enact charity and fellowship.

 

Charity Begins at Home

The new-and-improved Scrooge embodies Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. Charity begins at home and follows Smith’s social gradient of sympathy. Direct acquaintance and interaction enable charity in several ways. They help donors to discern real need and desert. (Cognition.) They heighten sympathy. (Sentiment.) They enable donors to let down their guard. (Trust.) And they provide a channel for donors to experience receipt of gratitude in return. (Reciprocity.) Dickens shows that Scrooge comes to bestow charity on individuals whose need, desert, and gratitude he can know and trust.

Charity naturally has circles and gradients. A charitable soul will perforce soon go bankrupt unless she targets and calibrates her gifts. Individual philanthropy might ignore the neediest, who tend to be socially remote from prosperous potential donors.

Private institutions — for example, churches and charitable foundations — might partly specialize in extending the scope of sympathy and charity, if they, too, can reliably identify true need and desert. However, A Christmas Carol focusses narrowly on the issue of individual philanthropy by businessmen.

Dickens ignores the invisible hand of markets-and-competition. Given the stark fallout of rapid industrialization and urbanization, his focus is understandable. Nonetheless the focus on Scrooge’s redemption implicitly oversells the potential effectiveness of seasonal charity in business circles as a remedy to destitution.

On the one hand, it would have been shallow in 1843 — and today, too — to have full confidence in any interpretation of capitalism as a rising tide that lifts all boats, or as a comprehensive institution of distributive justice. On the other hand, poverty was so widespread that only highly conditional, means-tested, very unpleasant public welfare was feasible for the polity. Whether or not one favors a universal basic income in prosperous countries today, surely it was impossible in England in 1843.

Intrinsic gaps in public relief — for example, eligibility restrictions in the Poor Law in England — warrant private charity. Scrooge has a Smithian moral duty of charity in the circumstances. There is always room and need for philanthropy insofar as private actors can identify worthy recipients.

Alas, Government welfare, however inadequate, partly crowds out private charity, leaving some gaps unaddressed. In the United States today, take-up of means-tested welfare (food stamps, public shelter, etc.) is low among the poorest decile of income. One reason why is Dickensian: Many among the destitute prefer less-regimented freedom on the streets. Another reason is that many among the destitute lead lives too chaotic for integration in the system.

Insofar as public relief and charity are substitutes, many among the destitute fall through the cracks because charity depends on sympathy, trust, and gratitude. The somewhat rare case of anonymous gifts is a partial exception.

Dickens provides a clue, apart from the meaning of Christmas, why charity finds expression in a season of giving. The novella brings to life enthusiasm, a social emotion that inspires good will to multiply by ‘contagion.’ 

I imagine that A Christmas Tale — despite its ungenerous depiction of the profit motive — still fosters good will and charity thanks to its vivid portrayals of sympathy, conscience, and the examined life.

 

 

Acknowledgment: I thank Liberty Fund and Renée Wilmeth for hosting a Timeless Reading Group about A Christmas Carol (December 2-8, 2024).

 

John Alcorn is Principal Lecturer, Shelby Cullom Davis Endowment, Trinity College, Connecticut and Visiting Scholar in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics (PPE) at Duke University.