Jonathan Rose, "How Historians Study Reader Response: or, What did Jo Think of Bleak House?": " ... some of ... [Dickens's readers] found it difficult to share his anguish over the hardships of the clerkly classes. Growing up in the depressed steelworks town of Merthyr Tydfil between the world wars, some poor schoolboys were a bit baffled when their teacher read them A Christmas Carol: ' ... we never could understand why it was considered why Bob Cratchit was hard done by -- a good job, we all thought he had.'"