Poverty In A Christmas Carol

Dickens was inspired to write A Christmas Carol after reading about the plight of poor children in the industrial towns of Northern England. As a result, we find many descriptions of poverty in the text.

In the first stave, for example, two gentlemen call on Scrooge and request that he makes a charitable donation to their collection for the poor. In the conversation which follows, we hear of the poor in workhouse and prisons, forced to live in squalor and to go without the necessities and comforts of life. 

Next, in the third stave, we find a description of Scrooge's employee, Bob Cratchit, and his family. Though they enjoy the Christmas season and are full of cheer and good-will, they are still classed as paupers:

"They were not well dressed; their shoes were far from being water-proof; their clothes were scanty; and Peter might have known, and very likely did, the inside of a pawnbroker's."

From here, the Ghost of Christmas Present takes Scrooge to see a family of miners. Here, in the "bowels of  the earth," the miner lives in a cottage made of stone and mud but his family are happy, all gathered around a small fire in the main room. 

Towards the end of the stave, we find another description of poverty. This time, it is two children who represent Ignorance and Want, and they are described as being "wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable." They have been taken from the world in the prime of their lives and have been physically scarred and aged by their deprivation and poverty. 

Finally, in the fourth stave, we see another, quite different, description of poverty. It is the neighbourhood of Old Joe's shop, where Scrooge's belongings are taken and sold after his imagined death. Dickens' description here is embellished, yet powerful:

"The ways were foul and narrow; the shops and houses wretched; the people half-naked, drunken, slipshod, ugly. Alleys and archways, like so many cesspools, disgorged their offences of smell, and dirt, and life, upon the straggling streets; and the whole quarter reeked with crime, with filth, and misery."

What we find, then, is quite a variety in the character of Dickens' descriptions of poverty. They show all facets of life, from the types of streets and houses that the poor inhabited to the physical effects of experiencing poverty. But, what is most striking here, is that Dickens does not vilify the poor or blame them for their situation. He is a sympathetic observer who seeks to highlight their plight to the reader.