The story's seemingly timeless transcendence hides the fact that it was very much the product of a particular moment in history
A Christmas Carol
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 11-hour workday. These were not exceptional stories, but ordinary. Dickens wrote to one of the government investigators that the descriptions left him “stricken.
Associated with this concept were the ideas of Rev. Thomas Malthus, who cautioned against intervening when people were hungry because it would only lead to an untenable population size. Better that the poor should starve and thus “decrease the surplus population.” What he wrote was that employers are responsible for the well-being of their employees. Their workers are not of value only to the extent to which they contribute to a product for the cheapest possible labor cost. They are of value as “fellow-passengers to the grave,” in the words of Scrooge’s nephew, “and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.” Employers owe their employees as human beings—no better, but no worse, than themselves.
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