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Lyle Solla-Yates (lyle@cville.online)'s status on Thursday, 25-Dec-2025 23:20:37 JST Lyle Solla-Yates

I’ve watched a few versions of A Christmas Carol during this most festive of seasons and especially last night I kept thinking about how unbelievably wealthy and privileged Dickensian England was during colonialism. All of this suffering and child labor and disease and filth was during a time of unbelievable luxury and privilege. They chose suffering, they chose inequality. Feels uncomfortably relevant to present day society.

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  Lyle Solla-Yates (lyle@cville.online)'s status on Thursday, 25-Dec-2025 23:20:34 JST Lyle Solla-Yates
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  Looking into this a little, Dickens appears to be reacting against the Poor Laws of his time, which were passed after the disruptions of the Black Death to suppress wages, crack down on travel, and force people to work who otherwise would choose not to given the terrible pay and working conditions of the time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Poor_Laws
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    English Poor Laws
    
    The English Poor Laws were a system of poor relief in England and Wales that developed out of the codification of late-medieval and Tudor-era laws in 1587–1598. The system continued until the modern welfare state emerged in the late 1940s. English Poor Law legislation can be traced back as far as 1536, when legislation was passed to deal with the impotent poor, although there were much earlier Plantagenet laws dealing with the problems caused by vagrants and beggars. The history of the Poor Law in England and Wales is usually divided between two statutes: the Old Poor Law passed during the reign of Elizabeth I (1558–1603) and the New Poor Law, passed in 1834, which significantly modified the system of poor relief. The New Poor Law altered the system from one which was administered haphazardly at a local parish level to a highly centralised system which encouraged the large-scale development of workhouses by poor law unions. The Poor Law system fell into decline at the beginning of the 20th century owing to factors such as the introduction of the Liberal welfare reforms and the availability of other sources of assistance from friendly...
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  Lyle Solla-Yates (lyle@cville.online)'s status on Thursday, 25-Dec-2025 23:20:35 JST Lyle Solla-Yates
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  Shout out to Man Who Invented Christmas and Christopher Plummer’s Scrooge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Invented_Christmas_(film)
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    The Man Who Invented Christmas (film)
    
    The Man Who Invented Christmas is a 2017 Christmas biographical comedy drama film about Charles Dickens directed by Bharat Nalluri and written by Susan Coyne. Based on Les Standiford's 2008 book of the same name, it stars Dan Stevens, Christopher Plummer, and Jonathan Pryce, and follows Dickens (Stevens) as he conceives and writes A Christmas Carol. The film was produced by Parallel Film and Rhombus Media. It was released by Bleecker Street in the United States on 22 November 2017, and by Thunderbird Releasing in the United Kingdom on 1 December 2017. It received generally positive reviews from critics. Plot In 1843, four years after the success of Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens (Dan Stevens) is experiencing financial pressures after the failures of his last three books. To restore his finances, he sets out to write a new one, but when his publishers will not meet his target of publication before Christmas, he decides to publish it himself. Seeing inspiration around London, most notably a rich man's funeral that is largely unattended and a mean-spirited old man who gives...
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