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01 / 05
Dinner With Dickens Was Slim Pickins

Blog Post | Wealth & Poverty

Dinner With Dickens Was Slim Pickins

Claims that characters in "A Christmas Carol" were better off than modern Americans are pure humbug.

Chelsea Follett —

Summary: There have recently been widespread claims that Dickens’s working poor were better off than modern minimum-wage workers. Such comparisons rely on misleading inflation math and selective reading. The severe material deprivation of Victorian life—crowded housing, scarce possessions, and basic sanitation problems—dwarfs today’s standards. Modern Americans, even at the lower end of the income scale, enjoy far greater material comfort than the Cratchits ever did.

Christmas is often a time for nostalgia. We look back on our own childhood holidays. Songs and traditions from the past dominate the culture.

Nostalgia is not without its purposes. But it can also be misleading. Take those who view the material circumstances of Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” as superior to our own.

Claims that an American today earning the minimum wage is worse off than the working poor of the 19th century have been popular since at least 2021. A recent post with thousands of likes reads:

Time for your annual reminder that, according to A Christmas Carol, Bob Cratchit makes 15 shillings a week. Adjusted for inflation, that’s $530.27/wk, $27,574/yr, or $13.50/ hr. Most Americans on minimum wage earn less than a Dickensian allegory for destitution.

This is humbug.

Consider how harsh living conditions were for a Victorian earning 15 shillings a week.

Dickens writes that Mr. Cratchit lives with his wife and six children in a four-room house. It is rare for modern residents of developed nations to crowd eight people into four rooms.

It was common in the Victorian era. According to Britain’s National Archives, a typical home had no more than four rooms. Worse yet, it lacked running water and a toilet. Entire streets (or more) would share a few toilets and a pump with water that was often polluted.

The Cratchit household has few possessions. Their glassware consists of merely “two tumblers, and a custard-cup without a handle.” For Christmas dinner, Mr. Cratchit wears “threadbare clothes” while his wife is “dressed out but poorly in a twice-turned gown.”

People used to turn clothing inside-out and alter the stitching to extend its lifespan. The practice predated the Victorian era, but continued into it. Eventually, clothes would become “napless, threadbare and tattered,” as the historian Emily Cockayne noted.

The Cratchits didn’t out-earn a modern American earning the minimum wage. Mr. Cratchit’s weekly salary of 15 shillings in 1843, the year “A Christmas Carol” was published, is equivalent to almost £122 in 2025. Converted to U.S. dollars, that’s about $160 a week, for an annual salary of $8,320.

The U.S. federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour or $15,080 per year for a full-time worker. That’s about half of what the meme claims Mr. Cratchit earned. Only 1% of U.S. workers earned the federal minimum wage or less last year. Most states set a higher minimum wage. The average worker earns considerably more. Clerks like Mr. Cratchit now earn an average annual salary of $49,210.

Mr. Cratchit couldn’t have purchased much of the modern “basket of goods” used in inflation calculations. Many of the basket’s items weren’t available in 1843. The U.K.’s Office of National Statistics recently added virtual reality headsets to it.

Another way to compare the relative situation of Mr. Cratchit and a minimum-wage worker today is to see how long it would take each of them to earn enough to buy something comparable. A BBC article notes that, according to an 1844 theatrical adaptation of “A Christmas Carol,” it would have taken Mr. Cratchit a week’s wages to purchase the trappings of a Christmas feast: “seven shillings for the goose, five for the pudding, and three for the onions, sage and oranges.” Mr. Cratchit opts for a goose for the family’s Christmas meal. A turkey—then a costlier option—was too expensive.

The American Farm Bureau Federation found that the ingredients for a turkey-centered holiday meal serving 10 people cost $55.18 in 2025. At the federal minimum wage, someone would need to work seven hours and 37 minutes to afford that feast.

A minimum-wage worker could earn more than enough in a single workday to purchase a meal far more lavish than the modest Christmas dinner that cost Mr. Cratchit an entire week’s pay. And the amount of time a person needs to work to afford a holiday meal has fallen dramatically for the average blue-collar worker in recent years despite inflation. Wages have grown faster than food prices.

There has been substantial progress in living conditions since the 1840s. We’re much better off than the Cratchits were. In fact, most people today enjoy far greater material comfort than did even Dickens’s rich miser Ebenezer Scrooge.

This article was originally published in the Wall Street Journal on 12/23/2025.

Scientific American | Vaccination

First-of-Its-Kind Vaccine Protects Children from Intestinal Infections

“Infections from enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli (ETEC) bacteria are the most common cause of travelers’ diarrhea, and they commonly cause childhood diarrhea in low-income regions. In children below the age of five, whose immune systems are still developing, the infections can lead to malnourishment; they cause up to 42,000 deaths annually. Soon there may be a vaccine to protect against these infections.

In the Lancet Infectious Diseases last month, scientists shared the results of the first study to evaluate the safety and efficacy of an ETEC-controlling vaccine in a large pediatric population in Gambia. The vaccine—called ETVAX—is among several in development to reduce ETEC infections in both adults and children. ETVAX provided immunity against the pathogens and did not have any adverse side effects.

ETEC bacteria have ‘adhesin’ proteins that enable them to attach themselves to the intestinal mucosa. The bacteria then release toxins, which lead to watery diarrhea and abdominal cramping. In low-income countries, a lack of access to sanitation and clean drinking water increases the risk of E. coli infections, resulting in more childhood fatalities and higher health care costs.

An approved oral cholera vaccine called Dukoral provides partial protection against some forms of ETEC diarrhea, but ‘at present, there is no approved E. coli vaccine available for protection against any type of E. coli infections in humans,’ says immunologist Ann-Mari Svennerholm of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, who co-authored the study. She notes that ETVAX is the first to show significant protection against E. coli infections in people.”

From Scientific American.

BBC | Sickness & Disease

AI Is Unlocking Treatments to Diseases That Were Thought Incurable

“Artificial intelligence is inventing new drugs against Parkinson’s disease, antibiotic-resistant superbugs and many rare diseases – progress that many scientists never dreamed possible…

‘We can – in a matter of days or hours – look at massive libraries’ of chemical compounds to identify those that display antibacterial activity, says James Collins, professor of medical engineering and science, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, US. With the help of AI, Collins and his team have already discovered two new compounds that could prove vital weapons against the highly drug-resistant infections gonorrhoea and MRSA…

Progress on Parkinson’s

…

Michele Vendruscolo, professor in biophysics and co-director of the Centre for Misfolding Diseases at the University of Cambridge in the UK … and his colleagues published a study where they used machine learning – a form of artificial intelligence – to search for potential drug candidates able to target the clumps of misfolded proteins in the brain that occur in Parkinson’s patients. The aggregations of proteins, known as Lewy bodies, are thought to play a role in the initial stages of neurodegeneration in Parkinson’s patients, eventually leading to symptoms including tremors, slowness of movement and muscle stiffness…

Vendruscolo’s AI-suggested compounds were then tested in the lab. ‘We measured which of the candidates were actually binding [to the Lewy bodies], and we fed this information back into the machine learning program, so it could learn from its own mistakes,’ he says.

They ended up identifying five promising new compounds more quickly and effectively than conventional approaches. The compounds identified by the AI were also far more novel than would have been found using more traditional drug development methods, says Vendruscolo. They are now undergoing further testing to assess whether they could one day be offered as a therapeutic to Parkinson’s patients.

…

New uses for old drugs

David Fajgenbaum, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in the US, managed to save his own life with an existing drug that doctors would never have prescribed him…

His experience opened his eyes to the potential that exists in the many thousands of drugs that have already been through the extensive safety testing required to make it to market. By repurposing these drugs to treat other conditions, patients get treatments they would not have otherwise.

In 2022, Fajgenbaum set up a nonprofit called Every Cure, using machine learning to compare thousands of drugs against thousands of diseases. The most promising are tested in laboratories or sent to doctors who are willing to experiment.

But while Faigenbaum is the most prominent scientist to have leveraged AI in this way, others are already making breakthroughs. At Harvard Medical School, an AI model found nearly 8,000 approved drugs that could potentially be repurposed to treat 17,000 different diseases.”

From BBC.