Scrooge, Trump, "A Christmas Carol" (video)

Lucinda Hawksley (BBC.com); Fusion; Pat Macpherson, Ashley Wells (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

Charles Dickens was only 31 when he wrote it

The real-life inspiration for Tiny Tim had a much sadder fate. Dickens’s frustration about poverty in Great Britain led to a classic, writes Lucinda Hawksley.

 

In May 1843, Charles Dickens was invited to a fundraising dinner in aid of the Charterhouse Square infirmary, which cared for elderly, impoverished men.

"Scrooge" 1935 vs. "Mr. Magoo's A Christmas Carol" 1962

Ironically, most of the diners were very wealthy men, who made fortunes in the City of London. Dickens wrote a contemptuous letter to his friend Douglas Jerrold describing them as “sleek, slobbering, bow-paunched, overfed, apoplectic, snorting cattle.”

He wanted to write something that would strike ‘a sledgehammer blow’ on behalf of poor children.

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The author was burning with desire to bring about genuine changes to society.

He was “stricken” by reading the 1843 parliamentary report on Britain’s child laborers, written by pioneering doctor Thomas Southwood Smith and intended to write a pamphlet titled “An Appeal to the People of England,” on Behalf of the Poor Man’s Child, “with my name attached, of course.”

The more he thought about it, however, the less impact he felt it would have. Instead, he wanted to write something that would grab people’s attention, something to strike “a sledgehammer blow” on behalf of poor children and have “twenty thousand times the force” of a government pamphlet. More

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