A Very Dickensian Christmas
The Dickensian idea of Christmas is entrenched in our culture.
Dickens’ writing doesn’t just influence our festivities, it also influences the news we get at this time of year because journalists revisit the traditional and strong sentimental link between poverty and Christmas. In writing A Christmas Carol, Dickens is said to be the man who reimagined the season as characterised by the spirit of giving.
So perhaps it’s no surprise that, as celebrations near, we see news stories focusing on helping the homeless over the festive season, providing children in poverty with gifts, seeing volunteers donate time and food. These stories can bring hope, they can encourage donations, make people aware of the struggles Christmas can bring.
But they can also bring their problems in representation. They can provide reassurance that poverty is being managed over the festive period when it is not, can depict people in poverty as passive recipients, as unheard and observed, as if poverty is a distant experience while other, normal people, tuck into turkey. News stories about poverty over the Christmas period risk romanticising poverty and placing it in a snowy Dickensian scene of magical happy endings. We know happy endings don’t come for many in poverty: Christmas can be isolating, celebrations can be severely limited, the day itself doesn’t bring reprieve from choosing whether to heat or eat. In fact, Christmas intensifies the misery of poverty.
Ultimately, and worryingly, news stories of people in poverty can become part of a nostalgic backdrop to Christmas. People in poverty can be presented in stark contrast to the indulgent festivities, inevitably made part of someone else’s narrative, talked about not with, and become a significant part of the yuletide atmosphere, as familiar and expected as mince pies and fairy lights.
We do need to discuss poverty (all year around!) but I think we need to be careful about how it’s done. The focus on charities, volunteers, those not in poverty helping those who are, can overlook and even ignore the experience of people in poverty.
The BBC, for example, reported Parcels to bring children ‘magic of Christmas’ and its story prioritises positivity by focusing on the good people are doing for children. It’s a nice story. It doesn’t, though, include comments from people in poverty. ITV X produced similar in reporting charities team up to create Christmas parcels for children living in poverty. Again, the good deeds of volunteers are celebrated but people in poverty are not interviewed. That Dickensian spirit of giving is central to the stories – people in poverty are the silent recipients of it.
This isn’t “bah humbug,” and it isn’t to dismiss the essential work of volunteers, or even to say that there aren’t other ways in which journalists report. This talking about people in poverty conveniently keeps them at a distance. My own experience of poverty, my years as a journalist, and my more recent academic research, tells me the annual revisiting of people in poverty to illustrate the broader Christmas experience is a problem: it risks us emotionalising, even enjoying, rather than eradicating one of society’s ills. After all, if this approach began with Dickens publishing A Christmas Carol, that’s over 180 years. Time for a change?
Journalists don’t set out intending to tread this familiar path but are part of almost 200 years of habitual practice that sees poverty depicted and represented in particular ways. The rest of the year is not without these habits. There is the observational approach – where people in poverty are discussed and described but not interviewed. There is also the experiential approach – where a journalist will try to live on Universal Credit for a week or experience homelessness for a night. These stories are produced with the best of intentions but ultimately talk over the people whose voices we need to hear – people in poverty.
Journalists will speak to people about their experiences of hardship after extreme weather, during strike action, when experiencing ill-health and so on. I think it essential to speak with people in poverty about that experience too: they’re the experts.
Only this way can we truly understand, educate, and honestly face, the horrors of living in severe economic hardship. So, in my work, I argue that people in poverty should be among journalists’ contacts, alongside MPs, charity workers, economists, because their knowledge is relevant and significant. Some organisations already offer media training for people in poverty exactly for this purpose.
I worked with Church Action on Poverty, in Salford, to produce the first Guide to Reporting Poverty for Journalists. I then collaborated with Joseph Rowntree Foundation to produce the most recent Reporting Poverty A Guide for Media Workers. Significantly, these guides use the real experts – people in poverty – and ensure their knowledge and understanding is central.
Social commentary in journalism is as important now as when Dickens produced it but if we’re to use it consciously – and working to eradicate the persistent problem of poverty – we need to speak with people in poverty not for or about them.
