Social Injustice

The key message from this book is simple: it's not fair that some people have enormous amounts of wealth while other people starve. Throughout the book, we are constantly reminded of the gap that existed between the rich and the poor, and Dickens reinforces this by creating characters like Bob, who is hardworking, decent and thoroughly deserving of more financial support.

Dickens's point is relatively clear: those who are capable of helping out their fellow humans should do. He reminds us that we're all in this together, and that we should look at other humans as being "fellow passengers to the grave, and not some other race of beings on other journeys." He also argues that there is an enormous amount of personal joy and satisfaction that can come from sharing what we have, and so - through sharing - we can make our own journeys happier.

There is an interesting anomoly with Scrooge though: yes, he isn't particularly generous with Bob, and forces him to warm himself by a candle rather than giving him some extra coal; but, Scrooge doesn't give himself the extra coal either. Scrooge doesn't help make other people merry at Christmas, but neither does he make himself merry. In this respect, Scrooge isn't like a lot of the Victorians who were enjoying the spoils of their wealth while ignoring those less fortunate than them; Scrooge is a different breed altogether. He's not hoarding his wealth to enjoy it, he's just hoarding his wealth in a way that suggests he has no understanding of how to enjoy anything. And I suspect that for Dickens - who loved and celebrated people with real joy in all his novels - this was a strange kind of crime itself.

Though Scrooge is criticised in the book for not taking economic responsibility for others, there is a thread that runs through parts of the book which suggests that the responsibility for making people like Scrooge lies within wider society itself.

Scrooge, as I've said before, was not someone who hoarded wealth so that he could enjoy it himself. He was, really, the worst kind of rich person: someone who hoarded wealth for wealth's sake. He didn't want the things that money could buy, he just wanted the money. The problem is that people like this become vacuums, hoarding society's money and doing nothing with it. If he'd been a little more happy to spend his money, he would have helped out local businesses, or restaurants, or tailors... as it is, he just absobs money like some kind of fincancial black-hole, and does nothing with it.

Rather than criticising him for this, however, Dickens makes Scrooge into a victim. During his time with the Ghost of Christmas Past, Scrooge is presented as someone who was neglected by his family and went on to become so terrified of poverty that he grew into the monster we see at the opening of the book.

Scrooge's recovery, however, is managed with a combination of fear and compassion. The fear of dying alone relies on the idea that, in his heart, Scrooge does want to be loved - something Dickens thought was true for everyone. But it was the compassion shown to him - by Fred, Belle, Bob, Fezziwig, and his sister - that really gives him a reason to love the world again.

So on one level this book is saying that people like Scrooge should be more responsible for those less financially successful that they are. But on another level Dickens is saying that - as a society - we should be more responsible for those whose upbringings have left them less emotionally or socially successful than others. Scrooge learnt to be a social outcast because of his upbringing, and he learns to accept society as a result of people's charitable behaviour. As a result of their emotional charity, he learns to become financially charitable.

Charles Dickens's father was a good man, or so history recalls. But he was imprisoned for debt, and was forced to take his whole family - except Dickens - to prison when Dickens was just 12 years old. It's difficult to imagine the impact that this would have had on the young man, though through his writing we can see it pretty clearly: Dickens was a passionate advocate for treating people fairly and decently, and this runs through all his books.

At the time when Dickens was writing, questions about how money should be managed in society were common. Adam Smith had written The Wealth of Nations 75 years previously - and that went on to become the go-to philosophy of the right wing; while Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote the communist manifesto - the left qing equivilant - not long before Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol.

In Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith argued that to make a successful society, businesses should be allowed to compete freely and wealth should be kept by those who earned it. This way, he said, society would evolve with the strongest being able to succeed. At the time, because so much welath was being kept by the aristocracy, this was a radical idea and it was embraced.

After 75 years of Adam Smith's ideas taking hold, Marx countered them by arguing that the free market created a society where a small number of people controlled far too much wealth, while good, hard working people were still being downtrodden. Marx argued that the state needed to intervene and protect the working people.

At the heart of this debate - which is still arguably the central debate of politics today - is the question of social justice. How do we create a just and fair society where talent, ability and hard work are rewarded? Dickens's whole family were imprisoned because his father fell into debt to someone who - presumably - had money to spare.

Though what happened to Dickens's father was well within the rules of society, punishing people who have nothing in order to protect people who have more than they need doesn't seem like a very fair thing to do. And who knows - maybe it was Dickens's younger sibling who was the real literary talent in the family, but they never picked up a quill since they spent their formative years languishing in jail...