Young people must give more to charity - or risk becoming Generation Scrooge

It’s one of the most famous stories in our culture, as much a part of our Christmas as the Nativity and Santa Claus. But this year, in the face of an ongoing cost-of-living crisis and a plunge in charitable giving, maybe the Ghosts of Christmas Past will feel a bit too close at hand.

At the beginning of A Christmas Carol, two charity workers visit Scrooge’s office. They’re looking for donations “for the Poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time.”

After all, poverty is everywhere in Victorian London: “Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts.”

Sound familiar? Scrooge sends them packing without delay. After all, Scrooge argues, there’s a safety net in place for such people. Aren’t there prisons and workhouses?

This year, we’re all Scrooge. Or at least far more of us are playing Scrooge than ever before. As household budgets remain tight, far fewer of us are donating to charity. It’s not just a lack of ready money: philanthropy simply animates us less now than ever before. And that doesn’t look set to change anytime soon because, demographically speaking, it’s the young who are the most Scrooge-like of all.

A report earlier in the year by the Charities Aid Foundation found that charitable giving amongst 16-24 year olds has plunged by more than a third, making them the only demographic in which well under half said they gave to charity. Charities, unsurprisingly, are at breaking point.

It’s often said that the Victorians invented our modern Christmas: their Christmas trees, Christmas cards and Christmas crackers certainly still help to define our seasonal celebrations. But the Victorians also understood that charity wasn’t just a nice afterthought at Christmastime. It was baked into the heart of their celebrations like a sixpence in a Christmas pudding.

Victorians commonly distributed turkeys, clothes, coal and toys to those who couldn’t afford them. On Christmas Day in 1851, thousands of hungry Londoners were fed roast beef and plum pudding in a marquee in Leicester Square.

Though poverty was extreme, so too were charitable ambitions. Giving at Christmas was seen as part of the national character. As one newspaper proudly put it in 1873, “Everybody gives in some form or another.”

This Christmas, thousands of volunteers will honour that tradition, helping at food banks, distributing toys, and, yes, giving billions of pounds to charity. But there will be fewer of them, and they will soon be outnumbered by the Scrooges. As Dickens tells us, though, it’s never too late to change.

At the end of A Christmas Carol, Scrooge meets those charity collectors again. This time, he gives them a donation that takes their breath away. So it’s time for us to resurrect one last Victorian Christmas tradition; now more than ever, it’s time to put charity back at the heart of our celebrations.

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Thomas Ruys Smith is Professor of Literature and Culture at the University of East Anglia and the author of a number of books about Christmas, including, most recently, Searching for Santa Claus: An Anthology of the Poems, Stories and Illustrations That Shaped a Global Icon (Boiler House Press, 2025).

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