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"Bah! Humbug."
"It’s humbug! I won’t believe it."
Christmas is for Fools
"Humbug" has two meanings in the 19th century; a hoax, joke, or hypocrite, or a boiled sweet. In the context of Carol, the term means that Scrooge is calling Christmas (and later Marley's Ghost) nonsense, a fraud. The earliest use of the word dates to the 1750s, but Dickens is the first person to use the term in relation to Christmas.
Humbugs
"There’s another fellow, my clerk, with fifteen shillings a week, and a wife and family, talking about a merry Christmas."
A half crown coin from the 1840s
Scrooge's job is running a counting-house. He lends money to people at usurious rates and buys and sells commodities.
Money in 1843
The 15 shilling/week salary that Scrooge pays Bob Cratchit is equivalent to a relative weekly wage ( i.e. its current spending power) of about $780/week in 2024 (or a relative annual wage of about $40,000 in today's money). This amount was enough to keep the Cratchits at the very bottom rung of the middle class, only barely scraping by with a family of two adults and six children.
A half-crown was worth 2 shillings and 6 pence--Scrooge threatens to withhold this amount from Cratchit's wages for taking the day off for Christmas.
The half crown that Scrooge offers to the boy who goes to fetch the prize turkey at the end of the story is worth about $25, but its relative value (again, its current spending power) in today's money is about $110.
in 1843 the Christmas goose that the Cratchits have for their feast would have cost approximately 7 shillings, so half a week's wages.
"The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?"
Treadmill
The prison treadmill was a device introduced in Britain in 1818, first as a means of preventing idleness in prisoners and later as a manual way of powering industrial production by grinding grains or pumping water. It was basically a 19th-century stair-climber, a means of cruel and fairly useless punishment: male prisoners were forced to be on it for 6 hours a day, in intervals of 15 minutes on, 5 minutes of rest. They petered out of use in the first decades of the 20th century.
Penal treadmill, 1864: the treadmill is on the balcony, while on the first floor incarcerated men line up to take their turns on it
Illustration from Oliver Twist, showing Oliver begging for more food from the master of the workhouse
Men at mealtime in the St. Marylebone workhouse, c. 1900 (photo credit: the Geffrye Museum)
The Poor Law and the Workhouse
In 1834, Britain introduced the Poor Law to reform and cut down the expense of providing governmental relief for impoverished people. The 1834 Poor Law established workhouses in every parish in Britain and made it illegal for able-bodied poor people to receive any money or help from the government except by living and working in workhouses. Workhouses were notoriously harsh places to live, partly because the “work” involved was grueling manual labor like crushing stones or picking oakum, and partly because they were designed to discourage people from going into them unless they were absolutely desperate. For instance, although workhouses were meant to provide relief for the starving poor, people in workhouses were fed barely enough to survive. They were treated like prison inmates: forced to wear prison uniforms, divided by sex, age, and ability (so families couldn’t stay together), often under constant surveillance, and regularly subject to cruel mistreatment by those running the workhouses. The callous philosophy underlying these desperately harsh conditions was that if workhouse life was TOO appealing—if the food was edible, the living conditions were decent, the education offered to the children was passable, and the work was bearable—then impoverished people would happily stay in them, seeing no reason to aspire to self-funded, better lives. Therefore, workhouses were designed to be brutal and dissuasive, and people who had no choice but to enter them suffered bitterly.
"Away they all went, twenty couple at once; hands half round and back again the other way; down the middle and up again; round and round!"
The Sir Roger De Coverley
The dance described as the culmination of merry celebration at Fezziwig's ball is called the Sir Roger de Coverley, a complicated but beloved English country dance. Related to the Virginia Reel, the Sir Roger de Coverley emphasizes the interweaving of community as participants in the dance skip around one another and dance through the arched arms of other couples, taking it in turn to be the lead couple.
The Stately Vintage Dancers preforming the Sir Roger de Coverley at Oakland Cemetery during the "Sunday in the Park" Event (2015)
"Such a bustle ensued that you might have thought a goose the rarest of all birds!...Its tenderness and flavour, size and cheapness, were the themes of universal admiration. Eked out by apple-sauce and mashed potatoes, it was a sufficient dinner for the whole family."
The Cratchits' Feast
A Christmas Carol is one of the texts that we associate with lavish holiday feasting, in part because the description of the Cratchits' feast in the story is so richly and lovingly detailed. This luxurious detail, though, is a deliberate formal choice that uses language to make very much of very little, in the same way that the Cratchits do with the meal in front of them. Goose was certainly a special occasion meal, but it was still far cheaper and more readily available than the turkey that Scrooge sends to the Cratchits at the end of the story. The text emphasizes the ways in which the Cratchits stretch the special treat of their goose with far cheaper ingredients like apples, potatoes, and onions to make it feed the whole large family. This is a fairly meagre meal, made joyous and plentiful both by the Cratchits' practical ability to stretch it and by their pleasure in each other's company. The scene of their feast is deeply affecting, not because we see them rejoicing in plenty but because their ability to cherish the family meal transforms something materially scant into something emotionally abundant.
"His active little crutch was heard upon the floor, and back came Tiny Tim before another word was spoken, escorted by his sisters to his stool before the fire."
What's Wrong with Tiny Tim?
What's Wrong with Tiny Tim?
From "Environmental Factors in Tiny Tim's Near-Fatal Illness"
Russell W. Chesney, MD, JAMA, March 2012
"Tiny Tim has been the subject of medical detective work to establish his medical condition. Tiny Tim is believed to have had rickets, tuberculosis (TB), polio, and/or cerebral palsy. Lewis built a logical case for renal tubular acidosis because it would affect the skeleton and could be reversed with the administration of alkaline salts. Demme believed that nutritional rickets was the answer, as did others. Callahan makes a strong case for TB with Pott disease of the spine. For a child of the first half of the 19th century who required iron braces and a crutch and who had a withered hand, other possible diagnoses include myelodysplasia, including a tethered cord and a skin-covered myelomeningocele; a lower spine injury; or a paraplegic form of cerebral palsy and nutritional deficiency. It has been said that Tiny Tim was patterned after the son of a friend of Dickens who owned a cotton mill in the Ardwick section of Manchester. Dickens' nephew, Henry, died of consumption and is also claimed as a model. In a large family, the youngest may have been underfed, which is another possibility for Tim Cratchit's condition. Malcom Andrews, a Victorian-era historian, has concluded that Dickens did not spell out the clinical specifics but created a penetrating fable."
"I’ll raise your salary, and endeavor to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop, Bob!"
Smoking Bishop
Smoking Bishop
From Eliza Acton's Modern Cookery (1845):
Make several incisions in the rind of a lemon, stick cloves in these, and roast the lemon by a slow fire. Put small but equal quantities of cinnamon, cloves, mace, and allspice, with a race of ginger, into a saucepan with half a pint of water: let it boil until it is reduced one-half. Boil one bottle of port wine, burn a portion of the spirit out of it by applying a lighted paper to the saucepan; put the roasted lemon and spice into the wine ; stir it up well, and let it stand near the fire ten minutes. Rub a few knobs of sugar on the rind of a lemon, put the sugar into a bowl or jug, with the juice of half a lemon (not roasted), pour the wine into it, grate in some nutmeg, sweeten it to the taste, and serve it up with the lemon and spice floating in it.
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