One of the most famous lines from Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is, “I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry”. Scrooge shouts it at two gentlemen who are collecting money to buy the poor some meat and drink. He continues, “I help to support the establishments I have mentioned – they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there.”

The establishments he is referring to are the prisons and the poorhouses. Scrooge’s reference to the “idle poor” tapped into a serious social concern of the wealthy in 1843: that they were working very hard for their money and that the poor were simply lazy.

We are now some 182 years later and it seems many of those with means have still not learned one of Dickens’s most important lessons, namely that

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