The Nation, April 18th, 1987
Malthus Then and Now When Dickens created Scrooge, he had theRev. Thomas Malthus in mind. The portrait was not overdrawn. Like Malthus, Scrooge held that the poor were to blame for their poverty and that charity would only encourage them to multiply; if they'd rather die than go to the workhourse, "let them die, then." But in the end, Scrooge repented. Malthus never did. "The year of his death--1834--was also the year of his greatest triumph," writes Gertrude Himmelfarb, a modern admirer. That, she explains, was the adoption of the new Poor Law, which ended home relief and replaced it with wo...
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