Subservient to no one

Um, spoiler alert, I guess. Perhaps I am reading Dickens wrong. I have not (not yet) visited the Victorian era, and reading his work from the comfort of my 21 st Century poverty, I have but the faintest inkling of true Victorian poverty. Around 1/3 of the urban population lived in poverty, as told here by Angie Speaks in this excellent work house video, and there were plenty of ways the poor were subjugated and systematically punished. So when one reads Dickens, I think one must remind oneself that Dickens lived in a world where poverty, death and sickness were commonplace, and not merely things transmitted to people's homes via the safe distance of mass medium communications. The prose at the beginning of A Christmas Carol describes Scrooge much like a pantomime villain, and despite this, I think one should acknowledge the severity of Scrooge's selfishness. Those opening words are not dissimilar to that of a fairytale, but like a fairytale, the story comes from a w