A Christmas story
December 25th 2009 22:23
In 1824 a man was accused and convicted in England of the crime of debt. At the time, this was punishable by imprisonment and the man and his dependent family, as was the custom, moved into prison.
The prison was the Marshalsea, an imposing building on the River Thames near London which had been a place of sorrow and nightmares since the 1300s. It housed a variety of criminals, including political figures and intellectuals accused of sedition, and men court martialled by the Royal Navy for "unnatural crimes".
Mostly, however, it housed London's debtors, and the length of their stay was determined largely by the whim of their creditors.
The other way to leave the Marshalsea was in a coffin. A parliamentary committee reported in 1729 that 300 inmates had starved to death in a three-month period, and that eight to ten prisoners died on average every day in hot weather.
One member of the family of our debtor who did not move into the prison was his 12-year-old son. At that age, in those times, he was not considered a dependent.
Neither was he uneducated or without wit and resources. The boy took lodgings near the prison, sold his collection of books, left school and got a job in a blacking factory, sticking labels onto pots of boot polish.
Behind his calculating and responsible actions, he was a nervous boy. The other workers in the blacking factory mocked him as "the young gentleman". He developed nervous fits. Devastatingly, when his father was released after three months in gaol, the boy was forced by family circumstances to continue working in the factory. He was humiliated, and he despaired at the constant misery he saw in the lives of the poorer classes of the population.
Twenty years later the boy-turned-man toured the tin mines of Cornwall and saw children working in appalling conditions, and about this time he also visited the Field Lane Ragged School, one of several schools set up for the education of London's starving, illiterate street children.
The man read the "Second Report of the Children's Employment Commission" dated February 1843, a parliamentary paper that exposed the dramatic and terrible effects of the Industrial Revolution upon the lives of poor children. The man decided to do something.
He set about writing an exposé of the situation in the form of a political pamphlet. He gave it a working title of, "An Appeal to the People of England, on behalf of the Poor Man's Child". However, work on the article dragged on for a year, the young man perhaps knowing that the impact of such a tract would fall far short of the awareness and publicity which he wished to generate.
He needed something, as he wrote to a colleague, which would have the force of a "sledge hammer", something which would have "twenty times the force – twenty thousand times the force – I could exert by following out my first idea".
Finally he dropped the plan to write a political pamphlet and wrote, instead, a novel. He called it "A Christmas Carol".
An 1843 first edition of A Christmas Carol. Pictured top: Charles Dickens in 1842.
.
| 19 |
| Vote |
