On Scrooge and Mill
Robert Wexelblatt
University of Boston
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The answer to anyone who talks of the surplus population
is to ask him whether he is the surplus population . . . .
-G. K. Chesterton
1. Over Port and Cigars
To commemorate the eightieth anniversary of the publication of A Christmas Carol, the public was presented with a facsimile edition, preceded by a rip-roaring introduction by G. K. Chesterton. Chesterton so combines liveliness with conviction that it is easy to be carried away by him. His chief claim even has a kind of glamour. This is that Dickens, the anti-Grinch, single-handedly rescued Christmas. From whom? Chesterton mentions two would-be Yulecides, “the seventeenth-century Puritans,” who simply failed to kill off the holiday, and “the nineteenth-century Utilitarians” who were presumably frustrated in their aim by the immensely popular story of Scrooge. But for Dickens, he writes, “The very word Christmas would now sound like the word Candlemas. Perhaps the very word carol would sound like the word villanelle” (vii).
Sometimes we simply agree with a text, but often we insist a text we happen to love agrees with us, even if it doesn’t. This must be especially true for people whose sympathies are broader than their opinions, like the reactionary Chesterton. So he sees Dickens as a Chestertonian, fighting “the final pitched battle against the new theories” (ix), an indignant looker-backward, a stout hold-out, like himself, against a soulless, joyless, vicious modernity who favors a merrier, more Catholic olde England. Frankly, this doesn’t sound quite right. The denomination of Dickens’ Christmas has always seemed to me Victorian rather than Catholic or even Anglican. Still Chesterton is certainly right about Dickens’ promotion of the holiday; in fact, merchandisers really ought to put up a bronze plaque in his honor in every department store.
What provokes me about Chesterton’s comments is his insistence that the unregenerate Scrooge is the embodiment of Utilitarianism. Everybody is sure that Dickens hates Utilitarianism. Even Dickens is certain of it, and he set out to prove it in Hard Times. But to me it is precisely the redeemed Scrooge who ideally exemplifies the internal sanction and universal ethical hedonism prescribed by the still Utilitarian and pre-socialist John Stuart Mill of 1863. Chesterton makes his point this way:
. . . [T]he old miser has the new arguments. Scrooge is a utilitarian
and an individualist; that is, he is a miser in theory as well as practice.
He utters all the sophistries by which the age of machinery has tried
to turn the virtue of charity into a vice. (ix)
Of course it is possible Chesterton is thinking of Bentham’s cold calculation rather than Mill’s “love of loving,” the former’s relentlessly quantitative ethics rather than the latter’s sympathetically qualitative kind. However, when he wants to show Scrooge’s superiority over the “enlightened” employers of the twentieth century, who would deny the poor even “their Christmas ale,” Chesterton backhandedly compliments what he calls Scrooge’s individualism. Here it seems clear that it is not Bentham but the Mill of On Liberty he has in mind:
[Scrooge] believed at least in the negative liberty of the Utilitarians.
He was ready to live and let live, even if the standard of living was
very near to that of dying and letting die. He partook of gruel
while his nephew partook of punch; but it never occurred to him
that he could forcibly forbid a grown man like his nephew to
consume punch, or coerce him into consuming gruel. (x-xi)
Chesterton must have been a brilliant dinner companion. I can imagine his dazzling discourse over the roast beef and Yorkshire pudding continuing during the retreat to the billiard room. But still, I would want to resist him. “Oh, come now, Chesterton,” I see myself retorting over port and cigars while affecting an Oxbridge accent. “That’s a bit thick. Gruel or punch, live and let die, miserliness as Utilitarian dogma? You’re a great man, Gilbert, and I’m sorry to have to say it, but you’re committing a vulgar error. I can only conclude that you’re so offended by Mill’s atheism that you willfully overlook his humanity, and so enchanted by Dickens’ humanity that you imagine he’s as ultramontane as yourself. If you want my opinion, Dickens, whom you revere, has exactly dramatized in advance what Mill, whom you detest, was to write twenty years later.” After that, I would be wittily put down, of course, but not, I think, refuted.
2. Scrooge and Marley and Malthus and Mill
I can be schematic. A Christmas Carol is the perennially appealing tale of one man gone right but also an allegory aimed at inspiring an entire society to go right. The symbolism is as transparent as Dickens’ biographer Edgar Johnson says:
Dickens—as always when he is deeply moved and most profound—
is speaking in terms of unavowed allegory. . . . A Christmas Carol is in
reality. . . a serio-comic parable of social redemption. . . Scrooge is the
embodiment of all that concentration upon material power and callous
indifference to the welfare of human beings that the economists had
erected into a system. . . The conversion of Scrooge is an image of the
conversion for which Dickens hopes among mankind. (489)
As Johnson airily observes, “What could be simpler?” The recent economists who appeared to make a system of selfishness—not just the red-meat free marketeer Herbert Spencer but also the well-meaning rivals Malthus and Ricardo—were challenged also by John Stuart Mill who, with no hope in supernatural intercession but just as much humanity or bluntness, also calls for a conversion of the capitalists. Mill is obviously all about the transmutation of individual psychological hedonism into the universal ethical variety, making a selfish altruism the base on which both public policy and private charity ought to rest. In Chapter Two of Utilitarianism he sums up both his program and Dickens’ theme:
The multiplication of happiness is, according to the utilitarian ethics,
the object of virtue: the occasions on which any person. . . has it
in his power to do this on an extended scale, in other words to be
a public benefactor, are but exceptional; and on these occasions
alone he is called on to consider public utility; in every other case,
private utility, the interest or happiness of some few persons, is
all he has to attend to. (26-27)
Scrooge seems too indelible a character to be a mere allegorical figure and yet that is what he is, an emblem of Malthus’s depressing thinking that prompted Carlyle to nickname economics “the dismal science.” Dickens is a marvel at enlivening even the most dismal theory. In introducing his protagonist he deploys five active participles to reinforce Scrooge as Hand, so to speak the rough side of Adam Smith’s providential, invisible one:
[He] was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! A squeezing,
wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! (3)
Malthus and Ricardo sound cold, but no more than Scrooge, who “iced his office in the dog-days; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas” (4). So insensitive is the man of business that he feels the weather as little as the way he is ignored on the street. Scrooge’s foil is, of course, his nephew Fred, who on his first appearance is described as if he were a cheery fire:
He had so heated himself with rapid walking in the fog and frost
. . . that he was all in a glow; his face was ruddy and handsome; his
eyes sparkled, and his breath smoked again. (Ibid.)
Scrooge’s incarnation of cold and insensitive economic theory becomes explicit when he replies with rhetorical questions to the two gentlemen collecting for the poor:
“Are there no prisons? . . . And Union workhouses? . . . The Treadmill
and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?” (13)
These words will be thrown in his face by the Spirits; but still more telling is what he says to the gentleman who objects that many would prefer death to the workhouse:
“If they would rather die. . . they had better do it, and decrease the
excess population.” (Ibid.)
The excess population. Here is Scrooge summoning up Malthus’s gloomy calculation that people increase their numbers geometrically while arable land expands, at best, arithmetically. Before Malthus nobody conceived of a surplus population; indeed, population was thought to be the real “wealth of nations.” The Reverend Thomas Malthus put paid to that blithe notion and began to intone like John on Patmos. “The view,” he wrote, “has a melancholy hue.” In The Worldly Philosophers, Robert Heilbroner sums up Malthus’ apocalyptic prospect:
[T]he larger portion of mankind would forever be subjected to some
kind of misery or other. For somehow the huge and ever potentially
widening gap must be sealed: population, after all, cannot exist without
food. Hence among the primitives such customs as infanticide; hence
war, disease, and, above all, poverty. (90)
Malthus was not an inhumane man and he did not relish what he had discovered; but he’s nonetheless relentless:
Famine seems to be the last, the most dreadful resource of nature.
The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to
provide subsistence. . . that premature death must in some shape
or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and
able ministers of depopulation. . . . But should they fail in this war
of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague
advance in terrific array and sweep off their thousands and tens of
thousands. (Quoted by Heilbroner, Ibid.)
My point is simply that in Dickens’ allegory the “excess population” is epitomized by the weakest, apparently most useless, and least fit to survive. Dickens certainly knew what Malthus wrote. Malthus was generally, if ineffectually, reviled and universally quoted at the time. Dickens also knew that the sufferings of “thousands and tens of thousands” move us—and will move Scrooge—less than one brave, cheerful, crippled little boy whose very crutch is more full of life than most subway cars.
Scrooge is famously transformed overnight, but he isn’t changed at once. His redemption requires a whole curriculum and the process is exactly the one outlined by Mill.
The program Scrooge gets with on Christmas Eve is a course of what Mill calls the two sorts of sanctions, external and internal. Of the former Mill says, with an uncharacteristic bow to religion à la Dickens’:
They are the hope of favor and the fear of displeasure from
our fellow creatures or from the Ruler of the Universe. . . (39)
The external sanction is the fear of pain or the loss of love and the hope of pleasure or of winning affection: the electric shock or the biscuit. Freud says the same thing and so do trainers of cocker spaniels. Of course Mill understands that the weakness of the external sanction lies in its being external; it can’t obligate us to caring about others’ happiness. A student who doesn’t cheat only because the proctor is hovering over her is prudent, not ethical. Cowardice is not morality. Mill is almost dismissive, then, of the external sanction. To him it isn’t enough that we be frightened of acting like Scrooge; however, again like Freud and the dog trainer, he admits that the internal sanction of feeling for humanity is only the internalization of the external, though he is quick to correct the idea that it is therefore purely artificial:
If, as is my own belief, the moral feelings are not innate, but
acquired, they are not for that reason the less natural. . . [The]
moral faculty, if not part of our nature, is a natural outgrowth
from it. . . . (44)
Writing of the same process, Freud fixes the business of socialization more memorably with a military metaphor:
The tension between the harsh super-ego and the ego that
is subject to it, is called by us the sense of guilt. . . Civilization,
therefore, obtains mastery over the individual’s dangerous desire
for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up
an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a
conquered city. (84)
Once you’ve got one, the superego is like Joe Louis and your ego like Max Schmelling; you can run but you can’t hide. Scrooge has misplaced his superego, or rather has turned it into the principle of profit and cheapness. The internal sanction is what Freud calls aggression channeled against oneself; its strength comes not from the strictness of one’s upbringing but the strength of one’s own aggression. Scrooge’s miserliness is a form of aggression directed against the world in general and the Cratchits in particular. The difference between external and internal control of aggression is, so to speak, a matter of range of motion. The mother needs to control the child. When he is still an infant she can do so physically; a toddler can be commanded by her loved and feared voice (“People won’t like you if you don’t share. . . Stop hitting your sister!”). But as the child’s activities extend beyond the reach of her hands and voice, the mother needs an implant. In effect, her voice becomes the child’s own. Freud calls this voice the superego, Mill the internal sanction, Disney Jiminy Cricket. In Dickens it is Scrooge’s rectified heart. The internal sanction may be only a continuation of the external one, but it is still vastly different in quality. The child who is spanked by his mother is not the same as the one who punishes himself. Depending on how you look at it, the latter is civilized, moral, or neurotic.
Since A Christmas Carol recapitulates this process rather strictly, Dickens starts Scrooge off with the external sanction. Marley is Scrooge’s savior, more precisely his intercessor (Marley-as-Mary), but his initial function is to threaten: if you don’t mend your ways you’ll wind up like me. Throughout the story Dickens animates objects—Scrooge’s house, the door knocker, Tiny Tim’s crutch. I particularly like his description of Marley’s chain:
It was made. . . of cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds,
and heavy purses wrought in steel. (25)
This commercial chain is a sort charm bracelet, a synecdoche for the sins of Scrooge’s class as well as the punishment that awaits him, implying not only the cosmic spanking that is at hand but the reasons for it:
“I wear the chain I forged in life. . . . I made it link by link,
and yard by yard; I girded it on my own free will. . . . [W]ould
you know the weight and length of the strong coil you bear
yourself?” (Ibid.)
Marley’s Utilitarian lesson couldn’t be clearer; for he says he is “doomed to wander through the world. . . and witness what [I] cannot share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to happiness” (30). Dickens’ anticipation of Mill’s ethics is quite complete when Marley adds:
“Not to know that any Christian spirit working kindly in its
little sphere. . . will find its mortal life too short for its vast
means of usefulness. . . . Mankind was my business. The
common welfare was my business. . . .” (33)
Marley, like Mill, knows that he can’t scare Scrooge straight. Fear is merely a prologue, the introductory lecture that sets up the course but converts no one to the discipline. Therefore, the task of the three spirits is to implant the internal sanction. “Without their visits. . . you cannot hope to shun the path I tread. . .” (35) Scrooge must learn in his old bones that the worst of hell for the countless specters he sees outside his window is the unhappiness of being unable to make others happy. For Mill, too, the conversion must be to a new form of happiness:
[E]ducation and opinion, which have so vast a power over human
character, should so use that power as to establish in the mind of
every individual an indissoluble association between his own
happiness and the good of the whole. . . . (24)
The happy Utilitarian is not dour but hearty, not ascetic but generous to himself and others.
3. Ontogeny Recapitulates Ontogeny
Scrooge has to re-live his childhood because it is in childhood that the moral feelings are implanted. Scrooge’s journey is propelled by sentiment. To prepare for it the Spirit of Christmas Past literally touches his heart, reviving that shriveled organ: “Its gentle touch. . . appeared still present in the old man’s sense of feeling” (49). But feeling unfocused is not in itself going to promote general utility. For active compassion imagination is indispensable. The degenerate Scrooge is not only a miser but a philistine. So Dickens shows Scrooge his boyish self, alone in the musty schoolroom on Christmas Eve, but happily picturing scenes from The Arabian Nights and Robinson Crusoe.
This episode puts me in mind of Mill and his own famous education. In his estimation, the breakdown that he suffered at twenty-one was a function of his father’s extraordinary home schooling. James Mill too was a “tight-fisted hand at the grindstone.” The curriculum is well known: Greek at three, Latin and math by eight, logic mastered at twelve, economics at thirteen, no holidays and no pals. Music was actually forbidden and when any poetry was assigned it was sure to be accompanied by Bentham’s dictum: “Quantities of pleasure being equal, push-pin is as good as poetry.” Of his father Mill wrote that he “regarded as an aberration of the moral standard of modern Romantic times the great stress laid upon feeling.” Emotion was too unreliable to promote general utility; only reason would do. Dickens understood that frigidity in the pursuit of virtue is as unprepossessing as cold selfishness, especially to children. It took Mill until he was twenty-one to come to the same insight.
It was over a sentimental incident in a novel (not one of Dickens’, of course, but it might as well have been) that the Benthamite house James Mill had made of his son’s mind crashed. Mill wept, realized that even achieving a society decent in every way wouldn’t make him personally happy, and determined that he was not “a stick or a stone.” What saved him is what saves Scrooge, a conversion, an immersion in feeling—first the poetry of Wordsworth, then the affections of Harriet Taylor, an attachment the father also abhorred. Poetry, which Mill called “the very culture of the feelings,” he now rated not merely on a par with ethical philosophy but its sine qua non. There is a personal, not to say Oedipal, element in Mill’s vehement revisionism, as there is rebellion in his passion for Mrs. Taylor. To Rousseauian compassion Bentham and James Mill had preferred stolid British self-interest, albeit socially enlightened. Mill, the Romantic convert, made feeling the pin in the pinwheel of his emended Utilitarianism, and these are the same feelings that people look for in their annual reading of A Christmas Carol.
Dickens’ faith is more in childhood than Christianity and so, once he thinks about the one he missed, is Mill’s. The degeneration of Scrooge from sensitive boy and Fezziwig’s cheerful apprentice to the young man who chooses money over love, the useless citizen and miserly exploiter, is nicely outlined in Chapter Two of Utilitarianism:
Capacity for the nobler feelings is in most natures a very tender plant,
easily killed, not only by hostile influences, but by mere want of
sustenance; and in the majority of young persons it speedily dies away
if the occupations to which their position in life has devoted them. . .
are not favorable to keeping that higher capacity in exercise. (14-15)
The moral risk of business is that business will be all. Poor Scrooge failed to take to heart the example of his first employer. Watching Fezziwig’s Christmas party Scrooge is not only recapturing his earlier self but getting a second chance at an object lesson in humane business practices, thus at the essential Utilitarian union of ethics and economics. “During the whole of this time, Scrooge had acted like a man out of his wits. His heart and soul were in the scene, and with his former self” (62). It is all arranged so he will learn the Utilitarian lesson, that his own happiness (self-interest, as Mill sees it) depends on the happiness of others. The Spirit is so confident of the lesson that he can even afford to tease:
“A small matter,” said the Ghost, “to make these silly folks so full
of gratitude.”
“Small!” echoed Scrooge. (63)
Feeling, generosity, imagination, his sister’s tenderness, boyhood associations, Fezzwig’s gladness—all are essential to Scrooge’s re-education, just as Mill’s rebellious conviction that quality of pleasure is more important than quantity was to his: “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied. . .” (14). For Mill, dissatisfaction is an engine of progress. Dissatisfied human beings are the ones who write Child Labor laws and worry about Tiny Tim’s health care.
The lesson is ruthlessly reinforced. Fezziwig shows Scrooge how to be the ideal boss of a patriarchal capitalism; the dowerless fiancée bitterly hopes money will comfort Scrooge when she does not; he sees her among her children and, having none himself, is enchanted by her eldest daughter. Overwhelmed by his loneliness Scrooge cries out like Gertrude riven in twain: “I cannot bear it!”
It’s interesting, though, that Dickens should give us a hint of what, apart from simple avarice, so altered the young Scrooge. After all, why did Scrooge change? On the personal level there’s the hint that his father, like Mill’s, could be an ogre; for when Fan comes to fetch him home from school she says, “Father is so much kinder than he used to be, that Home’s like Heaven!” (54). But we hear nothing further of Scrooge père. More serious is Scrooge’s harsh judgment of the world he lives in, the world of laissez-faire, the Corn Laws, and David Ricardo:
“There is nothing on which [the world] is so hard as poverty; and
there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the
pursuit of wealth.” (67)
To Dickens this worldly wisdom is sophistry, for it does not take into account the effects of pursuing wealth to the exclusion of all else and does not oppose to the relentless external sanction of poverty the mitigating internal ones of duty and love. It’s the latter—though not without years of protest and struggle—that have given us minimum-wage laws, the eight-hour day, workman’s compensation, and Social Security.
4. Scrooge Rises When He Falls For Tiny Tim
Scrooge’s bourgeois unhappiness, the misery of a Hobbesian pool ball sealed off from and merely colliding with other pool balls, is precisely the one described by Mill:
When people who are tolerably fortunate in their outward lot do not
find in life sufficient enjoyment to make it valuable to them, the cause
generally is, caring for nobody but themselves. To those who have
neither public nor private affections, the excitements of life are much
curtailed, and in any case dwindle in value as the time approaches when
all selfish interests must be terminated by death; while those who leave
after them objects of personal affection, and especially those who have
also cultivated a fellow feeling with the collective interests of mankind,
retain as lively an interest in life on the eve of death as in the vigor
of youth and health. (20)
The ground of feeling having been prepared, Scrooge next needs an outlet for his new-found empathy. The Ghost of Christmas Present takes Scrooge to see the Cratchits keep the holiday and here all is activity, joy, and mutual affection in the face of poverty. It is significant that Scrooge’s first reaction to watching the Cratchits’ Christmas dinner is: “Spirit, . . . tell me if Tiny Tim will live.” The Ghost throws Scrooge’s words back at him: “What then? If he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population” (96). Malthus’s theory the Spirit calls “wicked cant” and he reminds Scrooge that, “It may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man’s child. . .” (96-97). If a crippled child is a surplus, what is an unfeeling miser?
The spirit whisks Scrooge on a tour of miners on a moor, the barren lighthouse, a ship at sea, and finally to his nephew’s party, where the company is laughing at Scrooge himself. What’s to be done? Fred gives the answer, reminding us that miser and miserable share an etymology: “. . . his offences carry their own punishment. . . His wealth is of no use to him. He don’t do any good with it” (107). Such was Mill’s carrot for the captains of industry. But there was a stick too, another kind of external sanction—bloody insurrection. And this too Dickens anticipates when, at the end of the tour, the Ghost pulls two wretched, starved allegorical toddlers from the folds of his robe, Want and Ignorance. Do nothing to repair them “And bide the end,” he admonishes (118). Utilitarianism implies that only reform can save capitalism from merited destruction. In 1852 Mill said that if he had to choose between the current state of affairs in Britain and communism, he’d go with the latter, an argument which has force only if the speaker doesn’t care for communism.
Dickens and Mill are hardly communists. Scrooge should pay Cratchit better and allow him more days off; the capitalists should pony up for sewer systems and public education, but neither man questions the right of Scrooge to decide, neither gives up on the possibility of private property being used for the public good or the need for the incentives it provides to create new wealth. In fact, this is what they understand a happy ending to be. There will be no expropriating of the expropriators. Mill remains English, not Continental, an empiricist and no rationalist in love with theory. He understood the dangers of revolutionary abstractions and that communism could become a tyranny of surveillance and conformity: “No society in which eccentricity is a matter of reproach,” he wrote, “can be in a wholesome state” (see Heilbroner, 132). Here is a pair of authentic Englishmen: Dickens is the world’s champion manufacturer of eccentrics, and Mill preferred them to the risk of turning the Greatest Happiness Principle into an inefficient and totalitarian program that would become unproductive by concentrating only on the distribution of dwindling wealth. Better that Cratchit should be grateful to Scrooge and see him as his benefactor. Better patriarchal capitalism than everybody anxiously calling everybody else comrade. So let Scrooge’s hand remain on the tiller so long as it is an open hand, not a grasping fist. In Utilitarian economic theory as well as in a Dickens’ dénouement, amor vincit omnia. Scrooge has to love Tiny Tim. They are, in a sense, one. As the Ghost of Christmas Future reveals, they can save one another from dying on the same day.
As an economist, Mill’s great insight was the one implied by Dickens, that economic laws should govern production but not distribution (see Heilbroner, 128). Economics provides the money to buy the prize turkey but Scrooge is free to give it to the Cratchits, to make sport at his nephew’s party, and above all to use his cash to save Tiny Tim. Though less moving, Mill’s version is every bit as clear:
The distribution of wealth. . . depends on the laws and customs of
society. The rules by which it is determined are what the opinions
and feelings of the ruling portion of the community make them, and
are very different in different ages and countries, and might be still
more different, if mankind so chose. . . . (Quoted by Heilbroner, 129)
The finale of the story is as flamboyantly congenial as it should be, concise, unforgettable, and almost more dream-like than the dreams that precede it. The language of the Scrooge who awakes on 12/25 is that of rebirth; he even speaks in the short sentences of a child: “I don’t know anything. I’m quite a baby. Never mind. I don’t care. I’d rather be a baby.” He is filled with the happy anticipation of doing good to others, especially to one particular other. It’s a nice touch to have him enthuse over the prize turkey he intends for the Cratchits by exclaiming, “It’s twice the size of Tiny Tim” (156). So Tim doesn’t die and the human face Mill sought for capitalism turns out to be that of Ebeneezer Scrooge.
A Bibliographical Note:
A Christmas Carol belongs to all humankind who neither can nor want to resist it. The tale has come to function as a modern myth, like those of Faust and Don Juan, a common shorthand available to be alluded to on appropriate occasions. In fact, Scrooge is the antithesis of those heroes, in the sense that he is saved and they are damned. Faust and Don Juan wind up as high-brow operatic heroes, while Scrooge gets a musical, a popular carol written in a genial major key. Like the Ghost of Christmas Present, A Christmas Carol sheds general joy, fulfilling Mill’s injunction by promoting the greatest happiness of countless numbers of audiences. But the fate of the original manuscript offers a fitting irony all its own.
According to B. W. Matz, editor of the facsimile edition, Dickens presented the manuscript of A Christmas Carol to an old school fellow named Thomas Mitton, then it was sold to a London bookseller from whose hands it passed into those of a Mr. Churchill (not the famous one), then it landed with a bookseller in Birmingham, who sold it to Stuart Samuel and it was this Stuart Samuel who sold it to J. P. Morgan (xiv).
Works Cited
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol. facsimile edition, London: Chapman and Hall,
1923.
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents. New York: W. W. Norton, 1961.
Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1953.
Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph. New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1952.
John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism. London: Longmans, Green, 1897.