some historical context for A Christmas Carol

From Lisa Toland in Christianity Today...

Just in time for the holidays, Walt Disney has released what looks to be another memorable adaptation of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol....

It's a much-loved holiday story. Part of its charm is that it immerses us in a Victorian-era Christmas, replete with frosted windows, mistletoe, plum pudding, and jolly good cheer. But Dickens's classic also continues to capture our imagination because of its portrayal of a social and economic world of great inequity and deep suffering. It's a world more brutal than we sometimes imagine, and one that in many ways is not too different from our own....

Only nine years before the book's release, Parliament had passed the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, which sought to adjust existing care for the poor in light of growing populations and urban migration. What makes Scrooge's comments so biting is that the Poor Law, with its accompanying workhouses, was despised by the poor. The legislation's driving principle was that inmates were to reside and work in conditions deliberately sparser than those in which they would have lived and worked had they had steady subsistence-level work. The difficulty with a system that tried to separate the "deserving" from the "undeserving" poor was that many, most notably children, fell through the cracks....

Where was the church in all of this? England's urbanization and demographic re-arranging in the 1700s and 1800s made existing systems of charity within single parishes impractical and ineffective....

There is also the accusation—though it must be leveled with caution—that the established church of the 18th and 19th centuries was a bastion of elite, intellectualized men unconcerned with the plight of those over whom they ruled. It was this realm of need that many sectarian religious groups—including the Methodists, the Congregationalists, and in the 1860s, the Salvation Army—stepped into, with varying degrees of success....