Attitudes Toward The Poor In A Christmas Carol By Charles Dickens

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“If they would rather die…they had better do it and decrease the surplus population.” -Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
From the words of Ebenezer Scrooge, one can see that the rich and the greedy are heartless to the poor. Charles Dickens shows how the rich and powerful did not care about the poor and like Scrooge, they wanted them to die, so London would not be so crowded. The world of Charles Dickens is best understood, through his own life, industrialized London, and scriptures concerning the poor.
Charles Dickens was born on the 17th of February 1812. In 1824, when Dickens’ father was put into debtor’s prison the entire family moved into the prison to be with his dad expect for
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More factories were being built and families could send their children to the factories if they needed money or were in debtor’s prison. London was growing fast and there was not a lot of places for the poor to live, because people were replacing housing for the poor with factories. Many people had nowhere to live, so they lived on the streets. The streets were not clean and there was waste everywhere because there was not good sanitation. (Charlesdickenspage.com) The poor were not treated well, and many were put in prison or into workhouses.

Children were used in factories as labor. They would usually work in the workhouse and were mostly orphans. They were not fed well, and their clothes were dirty and ragged. If they were lucky they might have a pair of shoes, looked hungry and thin. Only a lucky few were able to go to school. In contrast, wealthier children went to school and were educated, they were well fed, and had warm clothes and shoes.
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What can one learn about our own society through this study? I think that people should study the world of Charles Dickens, because they can understand what it was like to live in Victorian London and how people lived at that time. In Charles Dickens’ books they are mostly about people that are poor, because Dickens wanted people to understand how the poor lived through his books. One can learn about our own society through Dickens’ books, because his main characters were either rich and greedy and did not care about the poor like Scrooge, or they were suffering or orphans like Oliver Twist. Today, people need to know how the poor and those different from themselves live. Charles Dickens books are a good example of the differences in society and economic class. I think that Dickens would be surprised that 200 years later we probably have more homeless people, orphans, crimes, drugs, and gangs. He probably thought that in 200 years there would be no more homeless people, and that we would have closed the gap between poverty and

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