Children's Story or Camouflaged Economic Polemic?

     Adam Smith. Thomas Robert Malthus. Economists from Scotland and England, respectively, who were not respected by Charles Dickens. Ebenezer Scrooge is said to be a parody of Malthus, especially with pronouncements like this:

"If they would rather die they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population." 

     Malthus was the eternal skeptic; whereas Dickens was the immortal optimist. Malthus wrote in An Essay on the Principle of Population that future human improvement was unlikely given the growing population, and, moreover, he championed the "there will always be the poor" idea.

     If you are Charles Dickens, you would have to take both of those ideas rather badly.

     [SPOILER ALERT] It is a bit ironic that the survival of Tiny Tim seems to vindicate a small part of Malthusian theory, but the overwhelming lesson, dressed inside an innocuous little children's book, was that human lives can be changed for the better if we help each other, that enough fat turkeys exist to feed the entire population, and why not let them eat cake!