“Marley was dead, to begin with”

The Galveston Historical Foundation’s Dickens on The Strand is held the first weekend of December in Galveston, TX and our research lab at UTHealth Houston’s School of Public Health, the PEOPLE Centered Lab, is a proud supporter. This event is near and dear to our hearts because we our work centers Policy, Evidence, and Outreach to Promote Labor & Environmental Equity. Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is not only about a grumpy man learning about the true meaning of Christmas, but also a satirical and acute observation about the limits of Victorian morality when it came to how the poor were treated. In Dickens’ book, Ebenezer Scrooge asked the gentlemen who were collecting funds for the poor, “Are there no prisons…And the Union workhouses?...Are they still in operation?”, to which the men responded, “Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.” It is here that Scrooge delivered his infamous line, “If they would rather die they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population!”

Historically, the 1834 new Poor Law that established the Victorian-era workhouses is what scholars today would define as structural violence, which is the way inequitable social, political, and economic systems and policies hurt people. “Many would rather die” is not a sensational statement given the inhumane and prison-like conditions reported at the workhouses. In essence, poverty was criminalized and seen as the fault of the individual. Dickens was a parliamentary reporter in 1834 and was well-versed in the new Poor Law arguments and debates. Moreover, Dickens understood first-hand what the conditions were like, not only because he visited the workhouses, but also because he was forced to forgo his education and work in a factory as a child.

As public health researchers, we also see what conditions can be like for people forced to work through sickness or leave their families for months at a time to provide for them. We have spent years researching and documenting the conditions of cruise ship and cargo vessel workers, commercial fishermen, and seafood factory workers. Their stories and experiences reveal dangerous working conditions, like fishermen having nearly 40x the occupational fatality rate than the US national average, as well as an indifference by most people who benefit from their cheap labor - the bananas they ship, the fish they catch, or the tourism industry they keep afloat.  

Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is a tale of complicity. When Scrooge is mortified by the children who are “wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable,” he asks the Spirit, “Have they no refuge or resource?,” to which the Spirit sarcastically replies, “Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?” One of our participants told us that people forget about their industry, and then as we were leaving asked, “Don’t forget about us,” and we promised him we would not forget. Now, we extend the same request to you this holiday season: to “honor Christmas in your heart, and try to keep it all the year” by remembering and supporting the people who put food on our tables.