Who said decrease the surplus population

Later on in the story, Scrooge will witness what poverty has done to the family of his own employee, Bob Cratchit , when he witnesses a vision of their desperately ill son, Tiny Tim , having died. Charles Dickens used A Christmas Carol to attack social injustices of the time, particularly the indifference of wealthy people towards the poor.

The introduction of the Poor Law Amendment Act took away local parish help for the poor and institutionalized the process with Union workhouses. In return for food and shelter, the poor had to live semi-incarcerated lives in institutions where families were often split apart and made to do menial tasks to earn their keep.

The businessman Ebenezer Scrooge has more than enough to share some of his money, particularly at a traditionally charitable time such as Christmas as reflected by two visiting charity collectors who explain i t is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices. Not wanting to part with his money, the miserly Scrooge hides behind a Malthusian excuse that if they would rather die , they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.

Scrooge views the poor and economically inactive which he terms idle as a burden to society, better off in a workhouse or even dead. He wants the Poor Law, workhouses or prisons to deal with the destitute, questioning the collectors whether The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then? Later on, in a vision presented by the Ghost of Christmas Present, Scrooge will see the impact of poverty in the household of Bob Crachit, his underpaid clerk, and their disabled son Tim.

They represent contemporary problems in society caused by the attitude of the wealthy towards the poor. When Scrooge is touched by their plight, the Ghost again uses his words against him, saying to Scrooge Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses? Dickens use of children to represent societal ills of Ignorance and Want suggest that there is time to change. He always did. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts , sir.

We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices. Dickens read the testimony of girls who sewed dresses for the expanding market of middle class consumers; they regularly worked 16 hours a day, six days a week, rooming—like Martha Cratchit—above the factory floor. He read of 8-year-old children who dragged coal carts through tiny subterranean passages over a standard hour workday. These were not exceptional stories, but ordinary.

This new, brutal reality of child labor was the result of revolutionary changes in British society. Workers were leaving the countryside to crowd into new manufacturing centers and cities. Meanwhile, there was a revolution in the way goods were manufactured: cottage industry was upended by a trend towards workers serving as unskilled cogs laboring in the pre-cursor of the assembly line, hammering the same nail or gluing the same piece—as an year-old Dickens had to do—hour after hour, day after day.

More and more, employers thought of their workers as tools as interchangeable as any nail or gluepot. Workers were becoming like commodities: not individual humans, but mere resources, their value measured to the ha-penny by how many nails they could hammer in an hour. And who worked for the lowest wages? Malthusianism is, indeed, the philosophy of the bug heap, of man as devouring swarm rather than ennobling angel. He is the symbol of abundance. He literally and figuratively holds a cornucopia, a horn of plenty.

While he wears a scabbard at his side, it is bereft of sword and neglected in care. Peace and plenty. And then he takes Scrooge where? To the university economics department? To the socialist meeting house? No, he takes Scrooge to the market, and shows him the abundance there, especially the fruits sometimes literal of foreign trade:.

Onions from Spain, grapes from the Mediterranean and citrus from the equatorial regions. How else could one eat oranges in England in winter? At the end of their Christmas feast, the poor Cratchits eat, yes, oranges. How else, other than through international trade, could the poor afford oranges?

Surely, Christmas Present, and his creator Mr. Dickens, and his teacher Mr. With every step, the wheel would turn, grinding corn. Prisoners were allowed 12 minutes of break every hour. The Poor Law is a reference to the popular economic theories of Thomas Malthus. Malthus argued that ruinous poverty and starvation were necessary ills, as society could not possibly provide for everyone and death would remove the undesirables from the population.

He supported the Poor Law to create workhouses for the poor, as people who were unable to sustain themselves did not have the right to live. In the fevered haunting of the second night, Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Present visit the holiday celebration of Bob Cratchit, with its tiny pudding to serve a family of seven.

His son, Tiny Tim, would have died under the Poor Law system. Bob held his withered little hand in his, as if he loved the child, and wished to keep him by his side, and dreaded that he might be taken from him. If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, the child will die. What then? If he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Scrooge hung his head to hear his own words quoted by the Spirit, and was overcome with penitence and grief.

Is it a foot or a claw! From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment. They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds.