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GCSE English Literature · key term
People regarded as exceeding the number that available resources can support. Scrooge uses this expression to dismiss poor people’s lives as unnecessary.
Used by AQA and Eduqas
Paper 1
Revise: Stave OneWhen a collector says many people would rather die than enter those institutions, Scrooge replies that they should “decrease the surplus population”. “Surplus” usually means an excess beyond what is needed. Applied to people, it reduces individual lives to unwanted numbers.
Component 2
The idea that some people are excess to society’s resources; Scrooge uses this phrase to dismiss poor people’s deaths, and Dickens challenges its dehumanising implications.
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The Ghost then repeats Scrooge’s earlier argument that the poor should die and reduce the “surplus population”. Those words sounded abstract in Stave One; beside Tiny Tim they become appalling. Scrooge now feels grief and repentance because he has encountered a person whom his own principle would dismiss.
