Editing A Christmas Carol (section)

===Social influences===
[[File:Francis Alexander - Charles Dickens 1842.jpeg|upright|thumb|alt=A man with shoulder-length black hair, sitting at a desk, writing with a quill|Charles Dickens in 1842, the year before the publication of ''A Christmas Carol'']]
Dickens was touched by the lot of poor children in the middle decades of the 19th century.{{sfn|Slater|2011}} In early 1843 he toured the [[mining in Cornwall and Devon|Cornish tin mines]], where he was angered by seeing [[Child labour|children working]] in appalling conditions.{{sfn|Pykett|2017|p=92}} The suffering he witnessed there was reinforced by a visit to the Field Lane [[Ragged School]], one of several London schools set up for the education of the capital's half-starved, illiterate street children.{{sfn|Lee, British Library}}

In February 1843 the ''Second Report of the Children's Employment Commission'' was published. It was a parliamentary report exposing the effects of the [[Industrial Revolution]] upon working class children. Horrified by what he read, Dickens planned to publish an inexpensive political pamphlet tentatively titled, ''An Appeal to the People of England, on behalf of the Poor Man's Child'', but changed his mind, deferring the pamphlet's production until the end of the year.{{sfn|Callow|2009|p=38}} In March he wrote to Dr [[Thomas Southwood Smith|Southwood Smith]], one of the four commissioners responsible for the ''Second Report'', about his change in plans: "you will certainly feel that a Sledge hammer has come down with twenty times the force—twenty thousand times the force—I could exert by following out my first idea".{{sfn|Ledger|2007|p=119}}

In a fundraising speech on 5 October 1843 at the [[Manchester Athenaeum]], Dickens urged workers and employers to join together to combat ignorance with educational reform,{{sfnm|1a1=Kelly|1y=2003|1p=15|2a1=Sutherland, British Library}} and realised in the days following that the most effective way to reach the broadest segment of the population with his social concerns about poverty and injustice was to write a deeply felt Christmas narrative rather than polemical pamphlets and essays.{{sfnm|1a1=Kelly|1y=2003|1p=15|2a1=Douglas-Fairhurst|2y=2006|2p=xvi}}