No Victorian writer had as many uses for philanthropy as did Charles Dickens, and from the early 1840s onward the trope became increasingly necessary to his depiction of social relations and, more particularly, the challenges stemming from the forms of social differentiation produced by modern industrialism. Just as Hawthorne does, Dickens identifies institutional philanthropy with a modern instrumentalising logic. But, unlike Hawthorne, for whom the phenomenon came to stand for a fundamentally antisocial regime in which the sympathetic impulse is stymied, Dickens's treatment is less unified and finds new rhetorical and aesthetic potentialities in philanthropic discourse. Dickens first uses the figure of philanthropy in A Christmas Carol (1843); from its initial incarnation, that figure is tied to the author's aesthetic concerns, including the role of sentiment in the representation of social difference and the relationship between material culture and modern middle-class subjectivity.