Charles Dickens on Seeing the Poor (Economists)

via Conversable Economist

Charles Dickens wrote what has become one of the iconic stories of Christmas day and Christmas spirit in A Christmas Carol.

Here's another piece from Dickens from the journal from the issue of January 26, 1856, with his first-person reporting on "A Nightly Scene in London."

Poverty in high-income countries is no longer as ghastly as in Victorian England, but for those who take the time to see it in our own time and place, surely it is ghastly enough.

Dickens did not entertain particularly Xmasy feelings for economists who he calls "the unreasonable disciples of a reasonable school." Dickens writes:

"I know that the unreasonable disciples of a reasonable school, demented disciples who push arithmetic and political economy beyond all bounds of sense (not to speak of such a weakness as humanity), and hold them to be all-sufficient for every case, can easily prove that such things ought to be, and that no man has any business to mind them. Without disparaging those indispensable sciences in their sanity, I utterly renounce and abominate them in their insanity ...". 

Here's Dickens:

A NIGHTLY SCENE IN LONDON