“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.”
If John Elwes was a well-remembered but odd character, Robert Malthus provided the venom that Dickens put in Scrooge’s mouth.
The Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus was born on February 13, 1766 and died on December 23, 1834. Malthus was an English cleric and influential scholar in the fields of political economy and demography. And there is no question that Dickens used the fact of Malthus’ death date, the day before Christmas Eve, as one similar in bearing to Marley.
“Mr. Marley has been dead these seven years,” Scrooge replied. “He died seven years ago, this very night.”
Malthus became widely known for his theories about change in population. His An Essay on the Principle of Population observed that sooner or later population will be checked by famine and disease, leading to what is known as a Malthusian Catastrophe. He wrote in opposition to the popular view in eighteenth-century Europe that saw society as improving and in principle as perfectible. He wrote of how the dangers of population growth precluded progress toward a utopian society:
“The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. . . . That the increase of population is necessarily limited by the means of subsistence, That population does invariably increase when the means of subsistence increase, and, That the superior power of population is repressed, and the actual population kept equal to the means of subsistence, by misery and vice.”
Malthus placed the long-term stability of the economy above short-term expediency. He criticized the Poor Laws (which were set up to help the poor) and, alone among important contemporary economists, he supported the Corn Laws (which introduced a system of taxes on British imports of wheat to benefit wealthy landowners and artificially drive up the price of bread for all, making it all but unaffordable for the poor and working class).
“The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation,” Malthus wrote in his 1789 book An Essay on the Principle of Population. “They are the precursors in the great army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world.”
Malthus’ disciples perceived the ideas of charity toward the poor, typified by Tory paternalism, were futile, as these would only result in increased numbers of the poor. These ideas found vice in Whig economic ideas best exemplified by the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. The Act was described by opponents as “a Malthusian bill designed to force the poor to emigrate, to work for lower wages, to live on a coarser sort of food,” and it initiated the construction of workhouses despite riots and arson.
Dickens was diametrically opposed, writing to his friend Forster years later, “I don’t believe now they ever would have carried the repeal of the corn law, if they could,” referring to Whigs and Tories alike. According to Forster, “he ascribed it to a secret belief ‘in the gentle politico-economical principle that a surplus population must and ought to starve.’ ”
“The great Malthusian dread was that ‘indiscriminate charity’ would lead to exponential growth in the population in poverty, increased charges to the public purse to support this growing army of the dependent, and, eventually, the catastrophe of national bankruptcy,” wrote Dr. Dan Ritschel, at the University of Maryland. “Though Malthusianism has since come to be identified with the issue of general over-population, the original Malthusian concern was more specifically with the fear of over-population by the dependent poor!”
It was clear at the time that the Industrial Revolution was taking hold in England. As it began to rise, some of the negative effects became obvious—growing urbanization begat rising unemployment and with that poverty increased; “Poor Laws” (first established in 1601) were an attempt to provide a safety net for those at the bottom of the economy.
But the laws were unpopular with many. The English propertied class denied responsibility for poverty and actively opposed what they viewed as income redistribution. In 1832 a Royal Commission published its findings, which had probably been predetermined, stating that the old system was badly and expensively run. In 1834 the Poor Law Amendment Act (PLAA) was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom passed by the Whig government of Earl Grey that reformed the country’s poverty-relief system. The PLAA curbed the cost of poor relief, which had been spiraling throughout the nineteenth century, and led to the creation of workhouses. Many who wrote and passed the laws were acolytes of Malthus.
“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.”
“Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”
“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
In England and Wales a workhouse, colloquially known as a “spike,” was a place where those unable to support themselves were offered accommodation and employment. The earliest known use of the term dates from 1631. Life in a workhouse was intended to be harsh, to deter the able-bodied poor, and to ensure that only the truly destitute would apply. But in areas such as the provision of free medical care and education for children, neither of which was available to the poor in England living outside workhouses in Victorian times, workhouse inmates were advantaged over the general population, a dilemma that the Poor Law authorities never managed to reconcile. As the nineteenth century wore on, workhouses increasingly became refuges for the elderly, infirm, and sick rather than the able-bodied poor.
Victorian Workhouses were dreary places, and many of the blueprints for these “state of the art” buildings of the period were in fact the blueprint for the modern prison today, with giant walls, a central tower, and long three-story shed rows spiking out of the central tower. They were actually referred to as “pauper bastilles.” The work in workhouses was menial at best, and few ever really learned a trade. Many were asked to tend the sick or teach, but many of those chosen did not have the skill set to do either.
For instance, a breakfast of bread and gruel was followed by a midday dinner that might consist of cooked meats, pickled pork or bacon with vegetables, potatoes, yeast dumplings, soup, suet, and rice pudding. Supper was normally bread, cheese, and broth, and sometimes butter or potatoes. The larger workhouses had separate dining rooms for males and females; workhouses without separate dining rooms would stagger the meal times to avoid any contact between the sexes.
But it was no coincidence that Malthus had died on December 23, 1834, eight years before A Christmas Carol was written, and only a year before Jacob Marley. There was no doubt in Victorian England whose voice had been imparted to Scrooge and Marley.