Zero to Hero? Disabled People in Literature

Chapter One: Malthus and Dickens

This chapter will begin by examining one of Malthus's proposals in his essay "The Principle Of Population" (1803) which will be studied in relation to Charles Dickens's work A Christmas Carol. The proposal in question is the attitude of Malthus towards "surplus population". The way in which Dickens expresses his disapproval of Malthus' idea is to be explored. There will also be an examination, in some of his other novels, of how Dickens uses disabled characters to symbolise opposing concepts.

Thomas Robert Malthus, an economist, published, in 1798, "Essay on Population" in which he posited, "that the power of population to grow was "indefinitely greater' than the power of the earth to produce subsistence' (Winch 1987, 19). In 1803 Malthus published another essay and as Glancy states,

In his "Essay on the Principle of Population" (1803), Malthus had argued that anyone who could not be supported by his parents and could not provide labor that society requires “has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and, in fact, has no business to be where he is.” (Glancy 1999, 60)

A Christmas Carol is used by Dickens to challenge this theory. When Scrooge is asked for a contribution to help poor people who preferred death to a workhouse existence, Dickens writes, "”If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it and decrease the surplus population.”"(CC, 13) So one method of population control has already been suggested by Thomas Malthus in 1803 and "Dickens was responding to the political economists of the time whose systems were partially based on the writings of Thomas Malthus." (Glancy 1999, 60). Dickens' response was to portray anybody who agreed with Malthus' idea as a miserly and miserable old man.

Charles Dickens tends to use disabled people in his novels as symbols of criminality and evil or, at the other extreme, as objects of pity. In Bleak House (1852-53) for example, a disabled but parasitic character "the subhuman Smallweed who fastens on his victims like some noxious insect"(Crompton 1958, 295). Set up in opposition to Smallweed is the sympathetic character of Phil Squod whose "Vulcanic deformity results from a warping occupational environment" (Arac 1977, 67).

Dickens had an obsession with deformities and Carey tells us,

When traveling in Switzerland he noticed that the women who sat by the roadside suckling their children had "such enormous goitres (or glandular swellings in the throat) that it became a science to know where the nurse ended and the child began." Dickens' obsession with deformity combines here with his habit of separating the body into inanimate bits. The two are closely related. Tiny Tim's crutch is a variant of the wooden leg fixation. (Carey 1973: 97)

Dickens writes many of his novels as social commentary and is demonstrating through particular characters his disapproval of the lack of political will to help those most in need. A Christmas Carol however is interesting because it is a ghost story as well as a criticism of the social ills of the time. As Lyn Pykett remarks, "A Christmas Carol is used to solicit the readers" sympathy for the causes (and Cause) of "Ignorance and Want" and the unreformed.' (Pykett 2002, 92).

Dickens makes effective use of Scrooge "to expose the horror of Utilitarian thought, laissez-faire economics and Malthusian population theory" (Pykett 2002, 92). Wilson states that crime, misery, inequality and violence came from lack of education and "by incorporating it into Scrooge"s terrible vision of the two children, Ignorance and Want, he involves it with his deepest personal apprehensions.' (Wilson 1972, 182)

At the Cratchit's house, Scrooge asks the Ghost of Christmas Present whether Tiny Tim would live. The spirit replies by reminding Scrooge of his statement concerning the decreasing of "surplus population". Again we are shown clear proof that Dickens believes some elements of society consider a disabled child to have no right to live.

This is commented on by Holmes,

A Christmas Carol exemplifies Dickens's vigorous opposition to those Victorian social reformers and businessmen who believed, like Scrooge, that charity

encouraged idleness and that the poor should be left to die and "decrease the surplus population" (Holmes 1999, 1)

In the novels which represent many of the harsh realities and social injustices of Victorian London, Dickens tends to use characters with disabilities as symbols of evil or pathos. This, it could be argued, was untrue of tales such as A Christmas Carol. However, "In A Christmas Carol ... Dickens adapts fairy-tale effects and fairy-tale techniques with marvelous skill" (Stone 1979, 120) and in doing so we are

immediately given the impression that all of the characters, not just the spirits, in A Christmas Carol are unreal. At the same time, they do represent the attitudes of their time. Christmas evoked a more spiritual feeling and was not regarded as an excuse for the kind of commercialization we witness of late. Waters remarks,