  We show that the closure of the compactly supported mapping class group of an
infinite type surface is not perfect and that its abelianization contains a
direct summand isomorphic to an uncountable direct sum of rationals. We also
extend this to the Torelli group and show that in the case of surfaces with
infinite genus the abelianization of the Torelli group contains an indivisible
copy of an uncountable free abelian group as well. Finally we give an
application to the question of automatic continuity by exhibiting discontinuous
homomorphisms to the rationals.
