“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

That quote from Charles Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol was derived from the essays of Reverend Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) who wrote prodigiously during his time about the need to decrease the “surplus population.”

One can’t say for sure that Malthus was suggesting people should just go and die, but Dickens employed the theory to make his point. He was deeply troubled by the widespread poverty and deprivation that industrial growth brought to England during his lifetime, whose society in the 1840’s generally held that poor people were lazy and immoral, lacking in character, thus deserving of their plight.

They were sent to workhouses where conditions were intentionally cruel under the belief that harsh circumstances would inspire them to raise themselves up and become upstanding citizens. Dickens knew better. He spent a good part of his childhood in a workhouse when his father was sent to debtor’s prison. He knew better than anyone that people who are starving, freezing, overworked and plagued with disease are rarely able to work their way to a better life.

As a philanthropist he gave generously to charities that helped the poor, but his most powerful weapon was his pen, and he aimed it with precision at the brutality of English moral code when he wrote A Christmas Carol in 1843. What was originally intended as a pamphlet that would wield a “sledge hammer” blow against the “modern” ideas about work and economy soon expanded into A Christmas Carol, the novella that was hailed as “a new gospel,” by Victorian readers and has remained a beloved classic for every generation since.

Join Johnny Kinsman in a dramatic reading (with illustrative slides) derived from the very script Dickens himself followed during the story’s 1867 United States debut, which just happened to be in the good old city of Boston!