Dickens
"Are there no workhouses?"
This illustration is from the "first printing of 6,000. In the early hours of Christmas morning the miserly, hard-hearted Ebenezer Scrooge is taken on a journey by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come. While he is with the Ghost of Christmas Present he is shown the children Ignorance and Want. These 'wretched, abject, frightful' children are man's creation and are represented by the illustrator, John Leech, against an industrial background, emphasising the cause of their poverty. Previously content that the needy in society had the Poor Law to oversee them, here a horrified Scrooge wonders whether these poor children have refuge. The Ghost mockingly responds using Scrooge's own, earlier, words: 'Are there no workhouses?'. "
