Examples Of Social Darwinism In A Christmas Carol

In Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol, we follow the main character Ebenezer Scrooge. Scrooge is a businessman in London. His business partner Marley died years ago leaving Scrooge to run the business himself. He did have one person work for him as his clerk. The only thing Scrooge cares about is his financial situation. Scrooge is a grumpy and lonely old man. One can say that he is a selfish person and not friendly at all. He’s not well like by people. Also, he doesn’t like the idea of anything fun and he also despises Christmas. During the story, Scrooge Is visited by ghosts. One ghost is the ghost of Christmas past, another is the presence, the other one is the future, and one is his business partner. His partner comes to let him know that

Many believe Charles Darwin came up with the theory. He did not. Its core principle stems from the motto “survival of the fittest”. Basically, Social Darwinism is the concept that the social group that’s strong in power will stay strong and the weak social group will stay weak in power. You can see this in the political world where if the there’re more republicans in the house than democrats, then the republicans will control the majority and thus can block anything the democrats try to do or pass, since the majority is republicans and they want to keep control of the power. Another way of saying/explaining social Darwinism would be, “the rich get richer and the poor get

You can see it in the interactions between Scrooge and everyone else in the story. Scrooge being a wealthy businessman is in a position of power and control. In the book, it says “they often “came down” handsomely, and Scrooge never did” (Dickens 40). This quote shows how Scrooge was stingy and didn’t want to give a helping hand. This shows aspects of social Darwinism by Scrooge keeping his money to himself and not helping the less fortunate and the rich keeping all their money for himself. Scrooge judges people harsh, especially, if the person is below his status. He also takes advantage of people because they don’t have equal power as him. That’s why people didn’t like him. “No beggars implored him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him what it was o’clock, no man or woman ever once in all his life inquired the way to such and such a place, of Scrooge” (Dickens 40). People were scared to approach him because of the way he was and the status that he had made them feel like they weren’t good enough to approach him. I would classify Scrooge as rich. If you weren’t on the same level as him then you were beneath him and he made sure that you knew it. As stated earlier about social Darwinism, the strong in power will stay strong and the weak stay the weak. One way the story showed this was “Scrooge had a small fire, but the clerk’s fire was so very much smaller that it looked like one coal” (Dickens 41).