Learning Objective
To understand the wider context of A Christmas Carol.
Success Criteria
• To explain what life was like in Victorian England.
• To understand some of the specific issues contemporary to
A Christmas Carol.
• To take effective notes.
A Christmas Carol
In Context
Victorian Society
‘Two nations between
whom there is no
intercourse and no
sympathy; who are as
ignorant of each other's
habits, thoughts, and
feelings, as if they were
dwellers in different
zones, or inhabitants of
different planets.’
Benjamin Disraeli, from
‘Sybil’ published 1845.
1. Who do you think the
‘two nations’ are that
Disraeli is describing?
2. How true do you
think this description
is of today’s society?
Rich and Poor in Victorian England
In Victorian England, the majority of
people were poor and many were
destitute.
The average life expectancy at this
time was 29.
A minority were wealthy enough to
live in decent houses, have regular
meals and pay for a doctor when they
were sick.
The wealthy lived side by side with
those who were living
in poverty.
London slum
Rich and Poor in Victorian England
•
Many wealthy Victorians believed that
the poor were lazy and had no
sympathy with them. We see this
attitude in Scrooge when the charity
men ask him for money:
‘…I can’t afford to make idle
people merry.’
•
Other Victorians were very concerned
about the plight of the poor, Dickens
among them.
Slum dwellers
Industrialisation
The Victorian era was a great age of
invention. The Industrial Revolution
was in full swing by the time
A Christmas Carol was published
in 1843.
The growth of large factories in cities
meant that people flocked from the
countryside into urban areas in search
of work and a better life.
London Bridge - late
19th century
London’s population went from one
million to six million between 1800 and
1900.
Industrialisation
Labour was cheap, which
meant more goods could
be sold at a lower price.
Mechanisation, especially
in textile manufacture, also
enabled cloth and other
products to be sold
cheaper in Britain than
anywhere else in the world.
Weaving Shed circa 1890
Transport links were
improved with the building
of canals and the invention
of the steam train.
LNWR express locomotive circa 1890
Industrialisation
This was a time of unprecedented
growth, for towns and cities and
for the country’s economy.
Britain changed from a largely
agricultural economy to a
manufacturing economy.
Shaw and Crompton - late
19th Century
Work
The growth of factories meant that
there were plenty of jobs for
ordinary people.
However, they weren’t paid much and
worked extremely long hours, 12-14
hours per day in a factory with only a
lunch break.
Having a job, even a relatively easy job
such as Bob Cratchit has, did not
guarantee that you could live well.
Leaving Platt’s Works, Oldham 1900
Work
There were lots of other jobs in towns
and cities, such as collecting cigar ends
to sell to re-use, collecting dog poo
which was sold to the tanneries, going
through the sewers for anything that
could be sold and in London, becoming
a ‘mud lark’, which meant spending your
days at the edge of the river Thames
looking through the rubbish the river
had deposited to see if there was
anything valuable to sell.
We can see the results of this scavenging
in A Christmas Carol when the spirit of
the future shows Scrooge a man in
a shop…
‘…where iron, old rags,
bottles, bones and greasy
offal were bought. Upon
the floor within were piled
up heaps of rusty keys,
nails, chains, hinges, files,
scales, weights and refuse
iron of all kinds. Secrets
that few would like to
scrutinise were bred and
hidden in mountains of
unseemly rags, masses of
corrupted fat and
sepulchres of bones.’
Victorian Children
Post-mortem
infant 1890
Infant mortality was common, so although
families had lots of children, many of them
would not survive until adulthood. In 1840, a
third of children died before their
fifth birthday.
Headstone photo courtesy of sean (@flickr.com) - granted under creative commons licence - attribution
Victorian Children
There was no state education,
so many children were not taught
how to read or write.
Huge numbers of children were sent to
work, from as young as five or six. They
would work in factories or doing street
jobs like road sweeping which is
brushing the road so that the wealthy
can cross without getting dirty.
In London alone there were estimated to
be 30,000 children who lived on the
street with no-one looking after them.
Boys in a children’s home 1869
Street crime was rife.
Photo courtesy of CSNAFC Century of Caring film Action for Children via Wikimedia Commons
Living Conditions for Working People
Large parts of towns and cities would
have been overcrowded, often with 20
people or more from several different
families living in four rooms.
There was no running water,
electricity, gas or inside toilets.
There would often be one or two
outside toilets per street.
Water was from a water pump, but
even so it was often contaminated.
Glasgow slum 1871
There were no sewers as such, so
effluent would run down the middle
of the street and eventually make its
way into the nearest river.
Living Conditions for Working People
Warmth would come from the kitchen
range or open fires.
The floors would be stone downstairs
and floor boards upstairs.
If you had a bath, it would be a tin bath which
was filled with hot water heated on the range.
Often the whole family would use the same
bath water, getting in one after the other.
Food would be bread, butter, tea, vegetables
and occasionally meat as it was relatively
expensive.
Many working people had no space or
equipment to cook and had to make do with
one pot and an open fire.
Tin bath
Health
With overcrowding and open sewers, it is
no wonder that health among working
people particularly, but Victorians
generally, was not good.
Cholera was widespread with large
numbers of people dying from it every
year. This was because of contaminated
water, but no-one at the time realised this
was the problem.
Victorians thought that bad smells, or
‘miasma’ were responsible for spreading
diseases. They did not know about germs
or bacteria.
Even the wealthy did not escape. The
children of rich parents still succumbed to
diseases like rubella, mumps
and measles.
Boundary Street 1890
Health
Employers had no responsibility to keep their
workers safe and even the green dye in
wallpaper (arsenic) was a deadly poison that
could kill the people who worked with it. It
didn’t do the people who had it in their houses
much good either!
For mental illness, people tended to be locked
away in ‘mental asylums’. A famous London
one was ‘Bedlam’ which was actually called
‘Bethlehem’. We hear Scrooge mention it
‘…talking about a merry Christmas. I’ll retire to
Bedlam.’
Men could have their wives locked away in
such places just to get them out of the way.
Patient 13, Surrey
County Asylum 1855
The Poor Law of 1834
Stapleton Union Workhouse
Each parish had to look after its own poor. Money or clothing and food
was given out to the poor, or if they were desperate, poor people could
go into the workhouse.
If you were in debt, you were put in ‘debtor’s prison.’
In 1834 the law changed so that money and clothing could no longer
be given out. The poor had to go into the workhouse or receive no
help.
Photo courtesy of brizzlebornandbred (@flickr.com) - granted under creative commons licence - attribution
The Poor Law of 1834
Parishes banded together in ‘unions’
to build workhouses if they had none.
These are referred to by Scrooge…
The Poor Law of 1834
Workhouses deliberately kept conditions
worse than the lowest paid independent
labourer would experience, to ‘encourage’
the poor to work.
The treadmill was a giant wheel which
workhouse men or prisoners pushed round
and round with their feet all day. This was
to keep them occupied and too tired to
revolt.
Children at Crumpsall
workhouse circa 1895
There were riots in the north, protesting
about the new poor law, which condemned
the poor to a life of misery, separated from
their family.
Education
In the early 19th century, illiteracy was
common among the working class as
education was not publicly funded and free
education was only provided by churches, with
the emphasis on religious teaching.
Nevertheless, most people would have access
to someone who could read (although not
necessarily write) and families would gather to
hear the latest instalment of the weekly ‘penny
dreadful’ serialised stories. Newspapers were
often read aloud in the pub and so most
people had some knowledge and contact with
texts of the time.
April 1891
Education
Boys working
at a mill
in Cheshire
Victorian
school room
From 1833, the English
parliament began providing
money to build schools for
poor children. The Forster
Elementary Education Act of
1870 meant that children
were now required to go to
school between the ages of
5 and 10 and by 1899, the
school leaving age was
raised to 12. Many of these
children would work for half
a day in a factory and spend
the other half at school.
Schoolroom photo courtesy of europealacarte (@flickr.com) - granted under creative commons licence - attribution
Reading
A three volume novel could cost
upwards of 31s and 6d (or over £100)
in the early Victorian era. This put
books out of the reach of most
people.
The development of mechanisation
and steam power meant it was
possible to mass produce books
cheaply, which allowed them to be
distributed via the railway and sold to
the working class people of Victorian
Britain.
Printed 1855
Photo courtesy of thomasfisherlibrary (@flickr.com) - granted under creative commons licence - attribution
Reading
The working people would rarely enter a
bookshop and so ‘hawkers’ or travelling
salesmen, took the books to where they
gathered. Dickens was one of the first
authors to take advantage of this,
publishing his novels in monthly
instalments which were cheap to buy and
small enough to pass around.
Printed between 1870
and 1887
Other technological advances added to the
popularity of reading. Electric and gas light
meant it was easier to read after dark. Train
journeys, which promised a smooth ride
and lighted carriage, were a perfect time to
read and publisher Routledge started a
‘Railway Library’ with books that were
portable and priced at just a shilling each .
Photo courtesy of thomasfisherlibrary (@flickr.com) - granted under creative commons licence - attribution
Thinking Point
Why do you think that
Christmas may have been
especially important to
the Victorian working
classes and poor?
Photos courtesy of artvintage1800s (@flickr.com) - granted under creative commons licence - attribution