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How does Dickens present Scrooge's attitude to the poor in this extract and in the novel as a whole?

Dickens makes Scrooge's contempt for the poor institutional rather than personal. Asked to give, he answers only with questions — “Are there no prisons?” and “And the Union workhouses?” — deflecting charity onto machinery built to punish poverty, not relieve it. That callousness peaks in “decrease the surplus population”. The clinical noun phrase reduces the starving to arithmetic, and it cuts deeper because “surplus” was Malthus's word — the economists' language Dickens spent the 1840s attacking. Yet the novel insists this attitude is learned, and so can be unlearned. The Ghost turns Scrooge's own words back on him — “Are there no prisons?” — a cyclical echo that forces him to hear his creed as cruelty, while Ignorance and Want confront Dickens's middle-class readers with the children their politics made. By the close, the man who priced the poor gives in secret — charity as habit, not spectacle.

Dickens makes Scrooge's contempt for the poor institutional rather than personal. Asked to give, he answers only with questions — “Are there no prisons?” and “And the Union workhouses?” — deflecting charity onto machinery built to punish poverty, not relieve it. That callousness peaks in “decrease the surplus population”. The clinical noun phrase reduces the starving to arithmetic, and it cuts deeper because “surplus” was Malthus's word — the economists' language Dickens spent the 1840s attacking. Yet the novel insists this attitude is learned, and so can be unlearned. The Ghost turns Scrooge's own words back on him — “Are there no prisons?” — a cyclical echo that forces him to hear his creed as cruelty, while Ignorance and Want confront Dickens's middle-class readers with the children their politics made

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