Dickens' A Christmas Carol was more than 150 years ago (178 years ago) and it portrays a man who allows his employee and his family's health to suffer from lack of money for fuel in a fairly negative light
-
-
Show this threadThanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
-
-
-
This Tweet is unavailable.
-
This Tweet is unavailable.
- Show replies
-
-
-
The idea that people in the past were just like "eh, let's just let huge chunks of our workforce and farmer die every winter" is bizarre. The nobility didn't care *that* much, but feudal workforces worked better if you didn't replace it on a regular basis.
-
This insistence that the capitalist concept of "just throw as many people into the grinder as possible, disturbingly high turnover rates aren't a problem" being a norm throughout history is really messing me up. The higher death rates were a real problem back then.
End of conversation
New conversation -
-
-
"We didn't have power and heating" but we did! Wood! Coal! Oil! I'm going to treat "power" as "lighting" and shake my fists while talking about torches, candles, oil lamps, kerosene lamps, gas lights and I'm sure there's more!!!
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
-
-
-
An impoverished child freezing to death was sort of society's iconic "innocent victim", if anything. It personified the moral crisis that clearly was felt by a *ton* of city-dwelling writers, when people die from the cold down the road from people who never even had to feel it.
-
"The Little Match Girl" does not suggest that people 175 years ago thought children freezing to death was normal and fine
End of conversation
New conversation -
-
-
150 years ago we didn't have climate change-related polar vortexes. 150 years ago if you build yourself a house on the Texas frontier it had a wood stove or a fireplace to cook with indoors so you could keep yourself warm. 150 years ago you got water from the well...
-
...so your pipes didn't freeze but on the other hand you could always catch the cholera and die. 150 years ago smallpox and cow pox and malaria and no penicillin. I don't get the point they're making at all.
End of conversation
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.