A Christmas Carol was published on December 19 1843, just months after the release of an important government report into child labour. This report was compiled by Dr Samuel Scriven, at the request of the Home Office, and detailed the lives of children who worked in the pottery industry in Staffordshire.
As well as being a novelist, Dickens was an active social reformer who read this report with a combination of interest and disgust. Through...
A Christmas Carol was published on December 19 1843, just months after the release of an important government report into child labour. This report was compiled by Dr Samuel Scriven, at the request of the Home Office, and detailed the lives of children who worked in the pottery industry in Staffordshire.
As well as being a novelist, Dickens was an active social reformer who read this report with a combination of interest and disgust. Through his observation of 173 potteries, Scriven found hundreds of children working upwards of 12 hours per day, in dangerous conditions and for very low wages. The vast majority of these children were barely able to read or write and suffered a number of health and development problems because of their work. According to the report:
"In numberless instances they, are required to labour on to eight, nine, or ten, and this in an atmosphere varying from 100 to 120 degrees; all these extra hours being occasioned, nine times out of ten, by the selfishness or irregularities of their unworthy taskmasters."
Dickens was thus inspired to bring the plight to these children to the public's attention and decided that the best way to do it was through the medium of story-telling. As for the recipients of the story, it seems likely that he wrote A Christmas Carol for those people who were ignorant to life for poorer people in society or, perhaps, for those children in the potteries, to give them a reason to be happy at Christmas.
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