Question

What is Social Darwinism (explain in your own words, without using outside sources) and what role does Social Darwinism play in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol? Granted, Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859, a few years after Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol in 1843, but to what extent is an early form of Social Darwinism at stake in A Christmas Carol?

Answer 1

The term 'Social Darwinism' is coined by the sociologist Herbert Spencer. Spencer borrowed this idea from Darwin who talks about the evolution of plants and animals in his study on the origin of species (1959). Spencer observed that the study by Darwin is silent on humans social evolution and only discusses the evolutionary cycle of plants and animals. Spencer propounded that just as the stronger will survive in terms of the biological constitution by Darwin's theory of natural selection; in his view, stronger will survive in terms of social, political and economic issues.Social Darwinism tries to explain the phenomenon of imperialism, racism, and capitalism.

It was in the writing of A Christmas Carol (1843) that Dickens takes notice of the asymmetric society. He observes in this book that unless the question of the welfare of the poor and the needy is addressed, the nineteenth-century society will be skewed forever. The poor will remain poor and impoverished forever and will be out of the survival cycle.This idea that poor should rather die and decrease the surplus population as seen as an unnecessary burden on the productive society is discussed by Dickens in A Christmas Carol.