In "Stave Two" of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, the Ghost of Christmas Past transports Ebenezer Scrooge to a time when he was a young man just starting to make his way in the world. It's also a time when Scrooge is developing his passion for acquiring money, which has an unfortunate effect on his relationship with Belle, a young woman with whom he's engaged to be married.
The Ghost of Christmas Past shows Scrooge his younger self sitting next to young Belle. Belle is wearing a mourning dress, which seems to symbolize the death of their relationship, a situation of which young Ebenezer is painfully unaware.
"Another idol has displaced me..."
“What Idol has displaced you?” he rejoined.
“A golden one.”
Young Ebenezer is struck as much by Belle's condemnation of his business endeavors as he is by her naiveté regarding the ways of the world.
“This is the even-handed dealing of the world!” Ebenezer replies bitterly, and a little sardonically. Ebenezer's dealings in the world of business have taught him "There is nothing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!”
Ebenezer has been poor, as has Belle, which she reminds him. “Our contract is an old one," she says, referring to their engagement.
"It was made when we were both poor and content to be so..."
Ebenezer is no longer content to be poor, and might not have been all that content with being poor when they were first engaged.
"... until, in good season, we could improve our worldly fortune by our patient industry."
Young Ebenezer has improved his fortune by his own patient industry, which he's done for the benefit of both of them. But Belle is condemning him for his industry, as does the rest of the world—a lesson that Ebenezer has already learned, but for which Belle gives him no acknowledgement and little understanding.
Belle tries to explain. "I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one by one, until the master-passion, Gain, engrosses you. ...That which promised happiness when we were one in heart, is fraught with misery now that we are two."
Ebenezer is well aware of the contradictions in what Belle says, as well as the conflicting feelings he has about the matter.
Young Ebenezer believes that he can maintain his relationship with Belle and at the same time pursue his business enterprises, but Belle believes that Ebenezer has changed too much. She believes Ebenezer no longer cares for her (or not as much as she would like him to care for her), and she ends their engagement.
"I release you. With a full heart, for the love of him you once were. ...May you be happy in the life you have chosen!”
It's interesting to speculate about how much effect Belle's rejection of the young Ebenezer contributed to his life of isolation and miserliness, and to his rejection of the world around him.
At the time, Scrooge's young self is trying to justify his desire for money. His fiancee, Belle, has come to release him from their betrothal because, she feels, he no longer loves her best of all things and people. She believes that he now craves money more than he does her hand in marriage. When she declares that a "golden" idol has displaced her in Scrooge's affections, he says the line that you have quoted in your question. Put differently, Scrooge believes that the world is incredibly hard on people who live in poverty but, at the same time, the world condemns people would seem to strive to acquire wealth. In other words, then, there is no way to win in the world because one will be censured for being poor and censured for trying to become rich! Scrooge is, obviously, irritated that Belle should seem to condemn him for his desire to amass wealth, as he sees this as a completely reasonable pursuit. Remember, too, that Scrooge lacked a lot in his childhood: food, companionship, love. The narrator has said that, when Scrooge was a child, there was "too much getting up by candle-light, and not too much to eat." He was left alone by his family for long stretches of time, and he seems to have learned that money will never abandon him, and if he has enough, he can at least ward off the material discomfort of his childhood.
In his withering use of irony, Scrooge expresses the paradoxical nature of Victorian values. The Victorians prided themselves on their religiosity, and by anyone's standards, Victorian England was a place in which religion played a significant role in people's lives. Most people at that time didn't simply believe in God; they regularly attended church, read the Bible for all it was worth, and endeavored whenever and wherever possible to live their lives according to the teachings of Christ.
In his earthly ministry Christ explicitly identified with the poor and dispossessed and openly encouraged his disciples to give up their material wealth and follow him. Yet in the England of Scrooge's day, despite the pervasive influence of Christian values, the poor were widely looked down upon and despised. The general attitude—one originally shared emphatically by Scrooge himself—was that poverty was a sign of moral failure. If you were poor, so the prevailing consensus held, then it was your own fault and no one else's.
Alongside this harsh attitude to the poor went a corresponding veneration of wealth and material success. Entrepreneurs like Scrooge were put on pedestals, held up as social benefactors whose aggressive pursuit of wealth was ultimately for the benefit of everyone, including the poor. And yet at the same time, most Victorian Christians paid lip-service to Christ's teaching that it was harder for the rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.
Scrooge clearly doesn't have a lot of time for what he sees, with some justification, as the humbug and hypocrisy of Victorian values with regards to wealth and poverty.
Scrooge is stating a paradox, a contradiction or an apparent contradiction. The Ghost of Christmas Past is showing him a scene from his past, a time in which he began to love money more than people. His girlfriend says to him that he no longer loves her, for his love of money has consumed him. He has made an idol of money, she says, and he worships it.
Scrooge responds with some irony as he states his paradox. He says the world is very hard on poverty, meaning that it does very little to help people who are poor. It lets them suffer. However, he also says that the world pretends to be very hard on the pursuit of wealth. People are caught in a trap, he says, for if they do not seek wealth and end up poor, they will be despised and blamed for it. However, they are expected to pursue wealth without actually seeming to desire or love it. This is hypocritical, Scrooge implies. Why is his girlfriend blaming him for actively seeking the money they will need when they marry?
His girlfriend tells him he is too fearful of being poor. She breaks their engagement, saying his heart has gotten too hard because of his desire for wealth.
At the time, Scrooge did not change, but now, watching this scene, he feels anguish and regret:
“Spirit!” said Scrooge, “show me no more! Conduct me home. Why do you delight to torture me?”
Now he knows that she was right. Perhaps he did become too obsessed with money.
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