religion

• Scrooge: '"I don't make merry myself at Christmas, and I can't afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned: they cost enough: and those who are badly off must go there."'
• Scrooge: '"Many can't go there; and many would rather die."'
• Scrooge: '"If they would rather die," said Scrooge, "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."'
• Scrooge represents the attitude of many rich people in the 19th century
• Scrooge's description of the poor as "idle" shows that he thinks that poverty is the result of laziness and not bad circumstances
• Scrooge thought that the solution to poverty was to send young people to workhouses
• Dickens uses A Christmas Carol to express his dissatisfaction with workhouses
• Scrooge: '"You are fettered," said Scrooge, trembling. "Tell me why?"'
• Marley's ghost: '"I wear the chain I forged in life," replied the Ghost. "I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?"'
• Dickens is using Marley's chains as a metaphor for the bad things he did in life, including his heartless attitude to the poor
• Dickens is suggesting that a life lived with selfishness and greed will result in eternal torment in death
• Scrooge: '"Spirit," said Scrooge, with an interest he had never felt before, "tell me if Tiny Tim will live."'
• Ghost: '"I see a vacant seat," replied the Ghost, "in the poor chimney corner, and a crutch without an owner, carefully preserved. If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, the child will die."'
• Tiny Tim represents the innocent and blameless poor who suffered through no fault of their own
• Dickens shows the reader that the lives of many poor people are reliant on the generosity and compassion of the rest of society
• Scrooge: '"Have they no refuge or resource?" cried Scrooge.'
• Ghost of Christmas Present: '"Are there no prisons?" said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. "Are there no workhouses?"'
• The Ghost of Christmas Present shows Scrooge Ignorance and Want to emphasise that poverty is a cycle - poor children grow up to be desperate adults if they are given no opportunities
• When Scrooge's line is quoted back to him by the ghost, Dickens is making it clear that prisons and workhouses don't give the poor any chance to escape that cycle of poverty