The Dickens classic is not just charming. It's also brutally realistic about the world, then and now.

Just in time for the holidays, Walt Disney has released what looks to be another memorable adaptation of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. The cold and harsh, penny-pinching Ebenezer Scrooge returns to the big screen, this time in animated form, to have his conscience reawakened by the apparition of his former partner, Jacob Marley, and the ghosts of Christmases past, present, and future.

It's a much-loved holiday story. Part of its charm is that it immerses us in a Victorian-era Christmas, replete with frosted windows, mistletoe, plum pudding, and jolly good cheer. But Dickens's classic also continues to capture our imagination because of its portrayal of a social and economic world of great inequity and deep suffering. It's a world more brutal than we sometimes imagine, and one that in many ways is not too different from our own.

The Hungry Forties

Published in 1843 as a statement against harsh child labor practices, A Christmas Carol carried poignancy in its original context that is difficult to fully grasp today. The severity of living conditions in 19th-century London, combined with the ambivalence of its "paternalistic" legal courts—illustrated so well in Dickens's Bleak House (1853)—is hard to exaggerate. The disparity in standard of living between the top quarter of London's population and the bulk of its citizens was stark. Few members of the aristocracy resided permanently in the capital, but came to London when the stench and heat of the city had subsided in the autumn, and when the courts and Parliament held their sessions. However, the merchants whose wealth rivaled that of the aristocrats were permanent fixtures on the metropolitan landscape.

London also hosted a growing middle or "professional class," comprising court officials and lawyers; Ebenezer Scrooge would be placed in this class as a usurer, banker, or property owner. Finally, the working classes composed about three-quarters of the population. These included shopkeepers, prostitutes, and children who labored in factories; a financial contribution from each family member was necessary for survival. Dickens learned this firsthand as a young boy who worked to support his family while his parents languished in debtors' prison.

Children growing up in London during the Hungry Forties—a depression coupled with poor harvests—were steeped in these disparities. The skyline was a sea of profitable smokestacks puffing clouds of sooty grit that covered rooftops and the cheeks of young chimney sweeps. Coal was the energy source du jour, and the resulting London fog often hid the real picture. The streets were covered in rainwater, the contents of chamber pots, and animal waste. Rats abounded. Small, often emaciated children sold flowers and matches, while the wealthy class's horse-drawn carriages swept past, throwing grime and muck on those too poor to afford transportation. Despite the horrid conditions, the birth rate rose as mortality rates fell: more children now lived than died. And as the population grew, so did the price of food.

The inhabitants of William Wordsworth's idyllic countryside were forced into the cities as the Industrial Revolution's machinery replaced their agrarian livelihood, and small farms were swallowed up by wealthy landowners. London's poor were crammed into shrinking housing districts, and they began to encroach upon the living areas of bankers and merchants, especially the West End and the financial district. The poor had no privacy or domestic bliss. Multiple families lived in single rooms in rundown buildings for exorbitant rent. These rookeries filled London with bodies: poor bodies, working bodies, and begging bodies, many of them children's. The shallow, snaking River Thames cut through this mass of people, horses, stench, and noise and carried the city's sewage and waste into the Channel.


The Treadmill And The Poor Law

This was Dickens's London—a place where need was perpetually apparent, where the government had seemingly provided for the destitute. When two men visit Scrooge asking for money near the beginning of the story, their good humor is met with interrogation: "Are there no prisons? And the Union workhouses? Are they still open? … The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigor, then?" Only nine years before the book's release, Parliament had passed the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, which sought to adjust existing care for the poor in light of growing populations and urban migration.

What makes Scrooge's comments so biting is that the Poor Law, with its accompanying workhouses, was despised by the poor. The legislation's driving principle was that inmates were to reside and work in conditions deliberately sparser than those in which they would have lived and worked had they had steady subsistence-level work. The difficulty with a system that tried to separate the "deserving" from the "undeserving" poor was that many, most notably children, fell through the cracks.

As it turned out, the poor avoided the workhouses because of the shame attached to them. The Anatomy Act, passed the year prior to A Christmas Carol's release, allowed the corpses of paupers who died in workhouses to be used for dissection. The unemployed poor lacked even the common decency of burial. So many of London's poor, without work, chose the streets to beg and prostitute instead of the government's supposed discerning benevolence.

Within this atmosphere of governmental impotence, Dickens's writing raised awareness. Despite its haunting images, A Christmas Carol is one of his tamer social tirades. And he was not alone in his campaign. Other writers like dramatist and journalist Douglas Jerrold continuously pressed for action, and Christmastime was often the key season for them to issue calls for justice. In fact, the first Christmas card, designed in 1843, called for those materially blessed to involve themselves in "clothing the naked" and "feeding the hungry."

Dickens not only wrote but also acted as a reformer to awaken Britain's collective conscience. In 1845 he set up a house for rescuing, reforming, and educating prostitutes, who could then begin new lives in Canada, South Africa, or Australia, away from the ingrown social stigma they would face in Britain. By the 1860s, enough charitable institutions and governmental reforms had started that child literacy rates and the poor's working conditions had tangibly improved. But the battle was uphill, as some saw poverty as inevitable, unchangeable, and even God-ordained. The social classes, each level with its own purpose, were necessary to maintain a revolution-free, efficient society.

Where was the church in all of this? England's urbanization and demographic re-arranging in the 1700s and 1800s made existing systems of charity within single parishes impractical and ineffective. The old model of the village church caring for the poor in its parish failed with an increasingly mobile population, and urban parishes faced more demands than they could meet. (The Poor Laws were partially an attempt to fix this broken system.)

good read,ive seen the trailors to this film,xmas has its origins in paganism,the reindeer shaman,its the summer solstice,was adapted by christianity,suicide goes up around xmas,

i love a christmas carol. especially the "Scrooged" version with bill muray.

I was always under the impresion that the sucide rate incressed April thru June. This being that these desolete souls that are continplating their dimise genraly do it.
after the hoildays. Because the Christmas and New Years Eve gives them something to look forward to. It's once all the excitment is over and their back to their own lives they start to remember the feelings of isolation and dispare.

Sunny May the month for suicides
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4528883.stm

Myths about Suicide

If you ever want to stump someone with a trivia question, ask this: "In which month are suicide rates highest?"

After you receive an (incorrect) answer, you can assert that suicides are highest in June. (This assumes you're in the Northern Hemisphere; in the Southern Hemisphere, suicides peak around December.) Indeed, there's a strong relationship between the amount of sunlight and suicide - it's just in the opposite direction we expect.

Yes, dark days can make us feel depressed, but they rarely drive us to suicide. Most people who attempt suicide already suffer from severe depression, regardless of the weather. Extremely depressed people, though, have difficulty formulating any kind of concrete plan to kill themselves; carrying out such a plan is even tougher because they rarely have the energy to do so. If anything, a lack of sunshine further saps their motivation.

According to one theory, exposure to sunlight increases the risk of suicide because sunshine first boosts energy and motivation, and only later improves mood. This means that there's a brief period -- perhaps a few days to a week -- when a person still feels horrible but now has the motivation to do something about it.

Some suggest that a similar process is behind the FDA's warnings that antidepressants raise the risk of suicide. Like sunshine, antidepressants may give people a quick surge of energy before they can feel better or think clearly. This explains why patients have to be closely monitored when they begin a new treatment regimen. (We should mention that this short-term increase in suicide risk is very, very small and only relevant to certain types of antidepressants.)

Unfortunately, this whole sunshine/suicide misconception has probably reinforced a couple of other myths about suicide:

Myth #2: Scandinavian countries -- such as Sweden and Norway -- have the highest suicide rates.

This isn't true. In reality, suicide is highest in Eastern European countries like Russia, Belarus, and Lithuania.

Myth #3: Suicide increases around the Christmas holidays.

Sure, we can all think of times when we felt blue around the holidays, but again, this is very unlikely to trigger suicide. Quite the contrary: suicide actually decreases around Christmas and other major holidays, when most people are reconnecting with family and friends.

Thats something I could agree with. Seems logical and pretty common sense.
To be honest I hate hearing people wanting to kill themselves.
Theres only 1 or maybe 2 scenarios that I could understand it.
1 being your only baby child being killed. The other... hard to think of anything worse than that. Actually nothing is worse than that if your a parent. If there is... You as a parent deserve to be bleed to death while raped in the ass with no lube and your genitals gnawed off by a rabid starving gerbil whose eager to explore.