"In 1843, Dickens had initially planned to publish a political pamphlet called An Appeal on Behalf of the Poor Man’s Child, but instead decided to plant “the ghost of an idea” in a festive story. Early in A Christmas Carol, for example, when a charity collector tells Scrooge that many people would rather die than go to a , Scrooge replies: “If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.” Modern readers might read this as a nasty character saying an almost cartoonishly nasty thing but in 1843 the phrase “surplus population” was a loaded term used to refer to the poor."