Some wealthy people understood that poor children would grow into poor adults unless intervention was made to improve their knowledge and to help them read and write. Basic education was provided for free at ragged schools by local people (not trained in education). Soon after, schooling became compulsory and students received a better standard of education.

In Victorian Britain, the average life expectancy was around 60. It was rare for people to survive until their 80s, especially in the cities.  Families were large and child mortality rates were high. Contagious diseases were widespread in the overcrowded cities. Cholera, typhus, dysentery and tuberculosis outbreaks saw huge numbers of deaths. Without vaccines or effective medicines, and without laws to provide clean water, these outbreaks were common up until the latter half of the Victorian period. Medicines were expensive and not available to poorer people, who had to rely on herbal remedies passed down by their parents or provided by chemists for a small fee. Medicines were unregulated and some were dangerous. Doctors were expensive and hospital work paid them very little. (The NHS was created over 100 years’ after A Christmas Carol was written).

In 1840 a study showed 77% of British people describing themselves as members of the Church of England and regular church-goers. Going to church on Christmas Day was expected and was certainly not an unusual event. The local vicar would be well known to most worshippers and absence from services would be noted and followed up at a later date. Employers were expected to give their workers the day off. 

Carols had a resurgence in popularity and were published for the middle class in collections so that the wealthy could profit off the oral traditions of the working class.Traditional hymns and carols for Christmas were being written at this time for the Church of England, which are the same ones sung today!

Church services in Victorian times were an opportunity for moral teachings derived from the Bible to be explained and taught by the vicar to his congregation. These sermons could last up to 30 minutes and would be followed by hymn singing and prayer. The emphasis was on asking forgiveness from God for wrongdoing and a duty to help others. These actions would result in salvation for the soul and a moral transformation. 

The commercialisation of Christmas happened at the same time as the Industrial Revolution – growing importance of food and drink was nothing new, but the key traditions of today (tree, presents, Father Christmas, etc.) were only just being created in this time period. 

A Victorian Christmas focused more on food, especially those luxuries that could not be afforded throughout the year. Mince pies, sugared fruit, plum pudding and goose would be accompanied by everyday items such as nuts, bread, pickled and fresh vegetables, mulled wine, etc. The working class would have enjoyed a Christmas dinner of goose, which was common and cheap, while the middle and upper classes would have enjoyed the expensive luxury of turkey.  Christmas puddings were served in all classes, though the working class would “pad out” the pudding with cheaper ingredients because fresh fruit was an indulgence in the winter. 

In the local area, people of the countryside in Norfolk and Suffolk could easily source their own meat (rabbit, pigeon, etc.) and a law was eventually passed that prevented their employers from “gifting” them rabbits instead of goose or pheasant for Christmas. This would cost the employers more money, but ensured that labourers were not being undervalued. 

Food at Christmas was not pre-made but was bought as the ingredients and made at home. A family would save money up throughout the year to buy extra food at Christmas and the women of the household would spend hours carefully making the meal for the next day.  Cooking would take place over an open fire or a stove (gas and electricity, though a Victorian addition to the home, had not arrived by the time A Christmas Carol was written). 

Presents as we understand them came later, so many families exchanged gifts of luxury foods at Christmas, hence the idea of children being given an orange in their stocking if they had been good (and a lump of coal if they had been bad!)

Snow was not typical in London in December (although winters were colder in the Victorian Era) and was not something people looked forward to. It froze water pipes, the streets would be icy with no one to salt or clear them, and melted snow often ruined roofs and windows (especially in poorer housing). While readers have romanticised the idea of snow falling on Christmas, Dickens actually uses snow and freezing weather to emphasise how cold temperatures severely effect the poor and increase their suffering. 

Redemption is a fundamental Christian belief that, no matter how bad (or sinful) someone has been, they have the chance to change their ways and receive the reward of peace and eternal life from God. Salvation is the act of saving someone from sin, helping them to live a good and wholesome life. 

The Industrial Revolution changed the world. It saw huge changes in the manufacturing process, in industry, and in warfare. It began in the north of England where newly invented machines sped up the manufacturing processes. Machines did not need rest and would work at the same rate each minute, whereas humans would become tired and make mistakes. Steam became the major power system in the Industrial Revolution and coal, mined from coal fields in the English Midlands, was its fuel. 

Workers found themselves replaced by machines and were paid less for the jobs they did. 

City populations grew enormously as people moved to work in the factories. Living conditions in overcrowded city streets were appalling and disease was widespread, but business owners became extremely rich as manufacturing became more efficient. Products of the Industrial Revolution, like steamships, iron-hulled warships, and new weapons, made Britain the most powerful and richest nation on earth. 

Under the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834 workhouses were set up to house those people who were unemployed or homeless.

Men, women and children were segregated in the workhouse and given repetitive work to occupy them, which was done in silence. Discipline was strict and food was basic –in this picture the male inmates are taking Christmas dinner together. It would be the only variation in diet for the whole year. People would suffer poor working conditions and low pay to avoid going to the workhouse. Losing your job and having no money to pay for food or rent meant you were ‘destitute’ and needed somewhere to go, as being homeless on the streets was against the law. Fear motivated people to work hard for little money. They knew that if they lost their job, the workhouse would be the only option left. 

Prisons were reformed during the Victorian period, making living conditions better and improving prisoner diets. However, prison discipline was strict. Exercise was taken in silence and prisoners were required to wear face masks to prevent identification and conversation. The crank and treadmill were also punishments used to keep prisoners busy. If a prisoner broke any of the rules, they would be sent to solitary confinement. 

Debtors’ prisons were different from criminal prisons as they were a punishment for people who had fallen into debt. Debtors would be held there until they had ‘worked off’ their debts. It was common for inmates to have their families live with them in prison to increase the amount of work they could do, thus reducing the time they spent in prison.Some were allowed out to work during the day, but the poorest of the inmates were crammed together in rooms and beaten by the jailers.

Dickens’ Attitude to the Poor

In order to answer the question, “What was Dickens’s attitude toward the poor?” we need to refine the question and ask: “What kind of poor?” Writers, politicians, social workers, and philanthropists of Dickens’s time tended to distinguish between the “deserving” and the “undeserving” poor—categories that were enshrined in the Poor Law of 1834.

Certainly Dickens was sympathetic to the working poor—what he would have considered to be the good or "deserving" poor. Examples of these are the Plornish family in Little Dorrit, as well as working-class characters down on their luck, like Stephen Blackpool in Hard Times, or middle-class characters struggling to hide their loss of class status as the result of poverty, like Bob Cratchit in A Christmas Carol. Dickens was almost always sympathetic to poor women, including prostitutes like Nancy in Oliver Twist, and children like Jo the street sweeper in Bleak House. 

But Dickens was also, like many of his contemporaries, worried, even afraid of the potential for crime and violence in poverty, particularly in people like Bill Sykes (Oliver Twist), especially when those people congealed into a mob. (The out-of-control masses of the Gordon riots in Barnaby Rudge, or the revolutionaries in Tale of Two Cities are good examples.) Generally speaking, Dickens believed—and strongly insisted in his work—that crime was a result of poverty and its corollary (outcome), ignorance; but despite his sympathetic treatments of characters like Magwitch in Great Expectations, there is a barely-controlled anxiety in many of his works about an unredeemable evil in some poor people.

In his own time, Dickens was seen as a champion of “the poor” by some of the poor themselves. (One of the street sellers Henry Mayhew interviewed in 1851 said Dickens was a great favorite of the “patterers” who sold ballads and other materials on the street; Silas Wegg in Our Mutual Friend is a patterer.) Author and critic G.K. Chesterton (1874 - 1936) characterized Dickens as “the spokesman of the poor”—a label that was almost immediately challenged by George Orwell, among others. But whatever ambivalences Dickens, like his contemporaries, had about poverty and the poor, one of his greatest achievements was to bring the problem of poverty to the attention of his readers through introducing varieties of poor persons into almost all of his novels, and showing the “deserving” majority of the poor, bravely struggling against the forces arrayed against them.

The Salvation Army was set up in 1865 in London by William and Catherine Booth.

The Booth’s believed that the war against poverty needed an army. Therefore, the Salvation Army has ranks and uniforms and its brass band is still a familiar sight around the country today.  The motto of ‘soup, soap, salvation’ saw the Salvation Army taking the word of God and offers of help and kindness out of churches and into communities. 

The Poor Laws had been around since 1605 as a means to control the movement of homeless people, who many believed caused crime and disorder. 

After the French Revolution in 1789, when working class people rose up against the wealthy, killing aristocrats and over-throwing the monarchy, the British government feared the same would happen in the UK, so used the law to control the poor.

The 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act made it a legal requirement for each local area to build workhouses. These were intended to house the elderly, the vulnerable, the homeless, and the unemployed and give them work in exchange for food and a bed. In reality, they were cruel, dehumanising institutions that treated poor people like criminals. The thought of the workhouse haunted people for much of their lives –the humiliation of becoming a workhouse inmate was unbearable, so poor working conditions were tolerated. 

Article written by: Kathryn Hughes for The British Library

Published: 15 May 2014 

During the Victorian period men and women’s roles became more sharply defined than at any time in history. In earlier centuries it had been usual for women to work alongside husbands and brothers in the family business. Living ‘over the shop’ made it easy for women to help out by serving customers or keeping accounts while also attending to their domestic duties. As the 19th century progressed men increasingly commuted to their place of work – the factory, shop or office. Wives, daughters and sisters were left at home all day to oversee the domestic duties that were increasingly carried out by servants. From the 1830s, women started to adopt the crinoline, a huge bell-shaped skirt that made it virtually impossible to clean a grate or sweep the stairs without tumbling over. 

‘Separate spheres’

The two sexes now inhabited what Victorians thought of as ‘separate spheres’, only coming together at breakfast and again at dinner.

The ideology of Separate Spheres rested on a definition of the ‘natural’ characteristics of women and men. Women were considered physically weaker yet morally superior to men, which meant that they were best suited to the domestic sphere. Not only was it their job to counterbalance the moral taint of the public sphere in which their husbands laboured all day, they were also preparing the next generation to carry on this way of life. The fact that women had such great influence at home was used as an argument against giving them the vote.

Educating women

Women did, though, require a new kind of education to prepare them for this role of ‘Angel in the House’. Rather than attracting a husband through their domestic abilities, middle-class girls were coached in what were known as ‘accomplishments’. These would be learned either at boarding school or from a resident governess. In Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice the snobbish Caroline Bingley lists the skills required by any young lady who considers herself accomplished:

A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages … ; and besides all this, she must possess a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions … (ch. 8)

As Miss Bingley emphasizes, it was important for a well-educated girl to soften her erudition with a graceful and feminine manner. No-one wanted to be called a ‘blue-stocking’, the name given to women who had devoted themselves too enthusiastically to intellectual pursuits. Blue-stockings were considered unfeminine and off-putting in the way that they attempted to usurp men’s ‘natural’ intellectual superiority. Some doctors reported that too much study actually had a damaging effect on the ovaries, turning attractive young women into dried-up prunes. Later in the century, when Oxford and Cambridge opened their doors to women, many families refused to let their clever daughters attend for fear that they would make themselves unmarriageable.