poverty

• (in response to helping those in destitution) 'are there no prisons? And the union workhouses?'
• 'The treadmill and poor law are in full vigour then?'
• 'I can't afford to make idle people merry.'
• 'at the ominous word liberality, scrooge frowned.'
• 'you'll keep your christmas by losing your situation.' + 'dismal little cell.'
• 'I'll give you Mr. Scrooge, the founder of the feast!' (Bob Cratchitt)
• 'withered little hand.' + 'plaintive little voice.'
• 'mankind was my business.'
• 'If they would rather die, they had better do it and decrease the surplus population.'
• They were a boy and a girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds.

  argument: ignorance and want are arguably a representation of the youth- however those that have been raised in industrialism.
• 'a stale and shrivelled hand' link to the influence of the affluent upon the poor- the 'staleness' of scrooge's character, for example his 'stiffened gait'
• 'they are man's'
• 'have they no refuge?' cried scrooge

  'are there no prisons? are there no workhouses?'