Private charities, such as the philanthropists who begged Mr. Scrooge for donations in one of Dickens' other novels, a Christmas Carol, could, quite simply, not keep up with the demand for charity.

The more effective solution Victorian England found to the problem of child hunger was linked with education -- namely that of the school lunch. In the 1870s, local philanthropic school meals services began to emerge in Britain. "By promising a scientific mechanism for identifying hungry children and calculating the minimum quantities of food required to satiate them, social and nutritional scientists provided ways of translating and depoliticizing the new social ethics of hunger into practical administrative techniques for the provision of school meals by the state"(Vernon 3). The institution of the school lunch effectively linked social betterment with good nutrition, acknowledging that a hungry child was more likely to commit crimes, while a better-fed child was less likely...
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