Surely the people in a church ought not to need such reminders? But Dickens knew only too well how much they needed this prodding, and how few acted upon it. Scrooge, however, is opened and healed enough that he can care whether another child, not so unlike his own childhood self, will live or die. In 1843 social Darwinism had not yet been formulated, but the groundwork was well laid for it. Victorians were particularly concerned by Malthusian dire predictions of overpopulation—hence Scrooge’s retort to the portly gentlemen that if the poor did not wish to suffer in the workhouses they should simply die and “decrease the surplus population.” The easy tendency was to not care about the deaths of the poor (an attitude that is well attacked in The Chimes). When Scrooge expresses concern for Tim, the Spirit hurls his own words back at him:

Scrooge hung his head to hear his own words quoted by the Spirit, and was overcome with penitence and grief.

“Man,” said the Ghost, “if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered What the surplus is, and Where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be that, in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man’s child” (p. 56).

People are not numbers; they cannot be fitly accounted for or disposed of merely as calculations or entries in a register. The worth of any individual is not readily discernable by any one human. It is both arrogant and un-Christian to try to make such determinations. Each individual must be recognized as a person, a part of that web of interconnectedness the Spirits have been showing Scrooge. Scrooge may have done what was legal or moral—supporting prisons and workhouses and pushing the treadmill laws—but who acts in a more Christian manner: Scrooge, who supports cruelty, or Bob Cratchit, who toasts Scrooge as “the founder of the feast?” Dickens does not leave us in any doubt.

The last part of the visitation of the Spirit of Christmas Present is left out of all but two films (the 1984 Hallmark production with George C. Scott, which skims it, and the recent A&E adaptation with Patrick Stewart). It is a powerhouse scene, and leaving it out is to ignore the driving force behind Dickens’s passion for this story.

In the autumn of 1843, Dickens visited Samuel Starey’s Field Lane Ragged School, one of a number of pathetic attempts to provide a bare minimum of education for the thousands of poor children in London. Though not as brutal as the country schools Dickens dismantled via his portrayal of Mr. Whackford Squeers and Dotheboys Hall in Nicholas Nickleby, Field Lane and similar schools left Dickens completely appalled. Like the treadmill and the Poor Laws, they really were little more than an attempt to get gangs of children off the streets. Anything resembling useful education or hope was barely visible at such schools. Dickens saw clearly that, under the guise of help, impoverished children were being written off as both unsaveable and undeserving, mere brutes who needed to be kept from sight of the middle class and turned into docile slaves of the mills and factories. The concept that they were even children, or deserved Christian cheer of mind and body, seems to have eluded most of the people promoting these institutions.

The people who took Dickens on this tour seem to have hoped he would write a pamphlet against a new set of laws being proposed against the poor. Dickens apparently thought he would write such a tract. Fortunately for us, his artistic sense wouldn’t allow it, and instead he penned A Christmas Carol.

Scrooge sees something protruding from under the Spirit’s robe; he cannot tell if it is a hand or a claw. He remarks upon it:

From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable....

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. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing....

“Spirit! are they yours?” Scrooge could say no more.

“They are Man’s,” said the Spirit, looking down upon them. “And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware of them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased” (p. 66).

Dickens is uncompromising, not only in his portrayal of the degradations of poverty, but in his assertion that these disasters, Ignorance and Want, are the creation of human beings.