Scrooge is walking with the Ghost of Christmas Present.
What’s that all about? I know England used to have very strict things-closing-on-Sunday blue laws, but would that really deprive the lower classes of the chance to dine?
I may be way off base here, but I have read somewhere that many poor households had their meals, or at least the main one, cooked in commercial establishments and then took them home. I’m thinking maybe a bakery or something like that? It was cheaper than doing it at home. So if the place had to be closed on Sundays and that was the only day they had off work, so it was the only day they could even hope to relax and enjoy a meal, they never got a real chance to have anything decent at dinner.
That’s it exactly – I would have thought the passage immediately before BrainGlutton’s quote would have made it clear:
Domestic ovens were a rarity at the time – most cooking was done over an open fire, or on the hob beside it, and those in the homes of the poor were too small to allow the roasting of meat on a spit. If they had a joint of meat, or a large bird, for a Sunday or Christmas dinner, they would take them to the local bakery, where they’d be put in the ovens after the days bread was done.
This also partially explains the popularity of puddings in British cooking – even the poorest family, like the Cratchits, had a copper to boil the water for laundry day, and they could cook quite a large pudding in that.
This kind of thing was common in Greece until quite recently (I saw people doing it about 10 years ago), and might even still go on in more remote villages. The common word for ‘bakery’ is ‘fourno’, which just means ‘oven’.
Strike out the part about bread - it was illegal to bake on Sunday, according to my annotated Carol; it wasn’t illegal to fire up the ovens and roast people’s meat for them though. Some lawmakers wanted to lose this “loophole”, as they saw it.
And those efforts were contemporaneous with the publication of “A Christmas Carol”?
Fascinating.
Does your annotated Carol tell us what a bowl of smoking bishop is? Scrooge and Bob Cratchit shared one, evidently, on Boxing Day, while they discussed Bob’s expected future with the firm.
Yes, it was highly topical at the time of writing. Of course, rich meanwells who could dine in comfort six days out of seven could well afford to keep the Lord’s Day holy, and some were out of touch enough not to understand why everyone wouldn’t.
“Bishop” is hot wine with orange and spices - much what we call “mulled wine” these days.
This is a reference to the repeated attempts during the 1830s of Sir Andrew Agnew, MP for Wigtownshire, to introduce a Sunday Observance Bill in Parliament which would have closed the bakeries and restricted many other Sunday pleasures of the poorer classes.[13] Dickens was vociferously opposed to Agnew’s plans and had attacked them in a pamphlet published under a pseudonym.[14]
I was perusing a few “A Christmas Carol” websites three weeks ago & was reading about this.
This is correct, according to my copy of the Annotated Christmas Carol. Most people did not have ovens, so the bakers allowed the use of their ovens (for a fee I would guess) since they were forbidden by law to bake bread on Sunday.
Or was sharp enough to think he’d caught the Spirit in an inconsistency, at any rate. Scrooge’s idea of social justice began and ended with the thought that his taxes went to fund prisons and workhouses, and anyone who was in need ought to go there, and if too proud, were welcome to starve instead.
My guess is that the unenlightened Scrooge was more concerned for the possibility of making money by selling hot food on Sundays than the benefit people derived from having that hot food. He wasn’t opposed to blue laws as a matter of principle but as a matter of profit.
That doesn’t fit in with what he said, though. Bear in mind that by this time he has already learned some lessons from Christmas Past - he has to an extent repented of his harshness towards both his nephew and Cratchit - and it seems as though his conscience is now beginning to prick him a little.
It’s my understanding that most of the poorest families did not have so much as a fireplace to cook upon–they simply lived in rooms, with privies outside, water pumps every few blocks, and no heat or cooking at all. Which was why it was so hard to keep clean; there was no hot water to be had, just whatever cold water you could carry in. And you would have to either buy your meals on the street, or pay to have them cooked.
In the colder winters, people would sometimes set fires in their rooms anyway, to keep from freezing. Since the tenements were firetraps, it was quite a dangerous thing to do.