Head-scratching bit in stave three with Spirit of Christmas Present

I read a section where the Spirit of Christmas Present shows Scrooge some people bringing their dinners home from the bakers. Scrooge then says to the Spirit:

"Spirit," said Scrooge, after a moment's thought, "I wonder you, of all beings in the many worlds about us, should desire to cramp these people's opportunities of innocent enjoyment."
"I!" cried the Spirit.
"You seek to close these places on the Seventh Day?" said Scrooge. "And it comes to the same thing."
"I seek!" exclaimed the Spirit.
"Forgive me if I am wrong. It has been done in your name, or at least in that of your family," said Scrooge.
"There are some upon this earth of yours," returned the Spirit, "who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us."


What was all that about? I looked up the notes on the back and it said:

Between 1832 and 1837 Sir Andrew Agnew (1793-1849) made repeated attempts to introduce a Sunday Observance Bill in the House of Commons. This bill would not only have closed the bakeries on Sundays but would have prohibited many of the people's recreations while leaving the wealthier classes unaffected. In June 1836, writing as 'Timothy Sparks', Dickens had attacked Agnew in a pamphlet called Sunday Under Three Heads. As it is; As Sabbath Bills would make it; As it might be made. In it he describes a working man emerging from a bakery on Sunday:

with the reeking dish, in which a diminutive joint of mutton simmers above a vast heap of half-browned potatoes... the dinner is borne into the house amidst a shouting of small voices, and jumping of fat legs, which would fill Sir Andrew Agnew with astonishment; as well it might, seeing that Baronets, generally speaking, eat pretty comfortable dinners all week through, and cannot be expected to understand what people feel, who only have a meat dinner on one day out of every seven.


It seems a bit weird that Scrooge, of all people, should begin criticising the Spirit of Christmas Present, a supernatural presence, over a law that a politician had been trying to introduce. Surely he was speaking to the wrong spirit anyway. He should have been speaking to the Spirit of Sunday. It seems odd that Dickens would interrupt his story to make his characters make a slightly clumsy political attack on a not particularly important politician.

I am also interested whether many people did not have access to their own ovens. I gather people got the chance to use the bakers' ovens on Sundays because bakers were not allowed to bake or sell bread, but had to keep their ovens warm anyway (why would ovens have to be kept warm?) It was jolly decent-spirited of the bakers to let poor people use their ovens. If many people did not have ovens, did they eat any cooked food the rest of the week? Or did they mainly eat bread and butter like Pip and Joe from Great Expectations?

I wonder what Dickens' views would be on matters such as Sunday trading, women bishops and gay clergy would be.

Well, Dickens was a social critic, so it's really not at all surprising that he inserted a bit about a law that he disapproved of and that would have, if passed, have hurt the working class.

And Scrooge was a contrarian, anyway; he would rarely pass up an opportunity to make a snide remark that put another person or spirit in the wrong.

When it says they "had" to keep the ovens warm, I suspect they mean that it was more convenient to keep them warm, i.e., with some hot coals kept warm under a blanket of ashes, than to restart the whole thing, which would have been very time-consuming. Pioneers often did the same thing with their stoves and fireplaces.