In 1842, the Second Report of the Children’s Employment Commission was released.
Young girls were spending 16 hours a day, six days a week, sewing garments.
Boys as young as eight were pulling coal carts in the mines, 11 hours a day.
Children were losing their limbs, often their lives, cleaning huge machinery in the cotton-mills.
The choice was simple, work in inhuman conditions or starve to death.
Not that those facts bothered everyone.
The Reverend Thomas Malthus saw no need to worry about the poor.
He said: “Better to let the poor starve naturally and decrease the surplus population.”
That was the attitude of the majority of the wealthy.
The poor were stupid and lazy, they had no use but physical labour.
There was no more point educating the poor than educating a horse or an ox.
The wealthy believed that a rich man was a self-made man.
Consequently, the pursuit of wealth for its own sake was a worthy goal.
A member of the Children’s Employment commission asked a young writer to help with a pamphlet to turn public opinion against the cruel treatment of the poor.
To bring the greed of the wealthy to everyone’s attention.
The young writer’s name was Charles Dickens and the pamphlet was to be called: “An Appeal to the People of England on behalf of the Poor Man’s Child”.
For research, Dickens visited tin mines in Cornwall, and Field Lane Ragged School in London’s east end.
What he saw there made him too angry to write a pamphlet.
He saw that reason alone wouldn’t change anything.
Someone else could write the facts and the figures – he needed to move people emotionally.
He said to the head of the commission, Dr Southwood Smith: “You will certainly feel that a sledgehammer has come down with 20 times the force of the first idea.”
And Charles Dickens wrote ‘A Christmas Carol’.
He had seen a Scottish grave inscribed: “Ebenezer Lennox Scroggie – a meal man”.
A meal man was a corn merchant, but Dickens misread it as “a mean man”.
That became his main character, Ebenezer Scrooge, a man who loves money above all else.
A man blind to the suffering and misery it causes and the terrible waste of humanity.
At night, three ghosts visits Scrooge and show him various scenes: past, present, and future.
Scrooge is touched by the plight of a sickly little crippled boy called Tiny Tim.
When Scrooge asks one of the ghosts if the boy will live, the ghost replies: “Better to let the poor die naturally and decrease the surplus population.”
The exact words of the Reverend Thomas Malthus.
The ghost shows Scrooge two starving children, just like Dickens saw in the Ragged School.
He tells Scrooge: “The boy is Ignorance, the girl is Want. Beware them both, but most of all beware the boy.”
Eventually, having learned the message in the dreams, Scrooge changes his ways.
The message being that the rich are responsible for the wellbeing of the poor. Something that had never even occurred to the wealthy before.
Dickens expressed social responsibility in emotional human terms instead of just cold, hard facts and dry data.
In the first year, the book had to be reprinted 13 times, in America alone it eventually sold two million copies.
People who would never read a dry, factual report read the book again and again.
Over the years, it’s been adapted 48 times for plays, 28 times for films, 87 times for TV, 25 times for radio, 4 times for opera, twice for ballet, 15 times for graphic novels, and twice for video games.
Since it was written, Dickens’ novel has been taught in schools all over the world every year at Christmas.
As Dickens said when he was first asked to write the pamphlet: “You will certainly feel that a sledgehammer has come down with 20 times the force of the first idea.”
As Walt Disney would say many years later: “We must entertain in order to educate, because the other way round doesn’t work.”