A Christmas Carol
A Christmas Ghost Story
[Wikipedia]
A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas, commonly known as A Christmas Carol, is a novella by Charles Dickens, first published in London by Chapman & Hall in 1843 and illustrated by John Leech. It recounts the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, an elderly miser who is visited by the ghost of his former business partner Jacob Marley and the spirits of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come. In the process, Scrooge is transformed into a kinder, gentler man.
Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol during a period when the British were exploring and re-evaluating past Christmas traditions, including carols, and newer customs such as cards and Christmas trees. He was influenced by the experiences of his own youth and by the Christmas stories of other authors, including Washington Irving and Douglas Jerrold. Dickens had written three Christmas stories prior to the novella, and was inspired following a visit to the Field Lane Ragged School, one of several establishments for London's street children. The treatment of the poor and the ability of a selfish man to redeem himself by transforming into a more sympathetic character are the key themes of the story. There is discussion among academics as to whether this is a fully secular story or a Christian allegory.
Published on 19 December, the first edition sold out by Christmas Eve; by the end of 1844 thirteen editions had been released. Most critics reviewed the novella favourably. The story was illicitly copied in January 1844; Dickens took legal action against the publishers, who went bankrupt, further reducing Dickens's small profits from the publication. He subsequently wrote four other Christmas stories. In 1849 he began public readings of the story, which proved so successful he undertook 127 further performances until 1870, the year of his death. A Christmas Carol has never been out of print and has been translated into several languages; the story has been adapted many times for film, stage, opera and other media.
A Christmas Carol captured the zeitgeist of the early Victorian revival of the Christmas holiday. Dickens acknowledged the influence of the modern Western observance of Christmas and later inspired several aspects of Christmas, including family gatherings, seasonal food and drink, dancing, games and a festive generosity of spirit.
Background
The writer Charles Dickens was born to a middle-class family which got into financial difficulties as a result of the spendthrift nature of his father John. In 1824 John was committed to the Marshalsea, a debtors' prison in Southwark, London. Dickens, aged 12, was forced to pawn his collection of books, leave school and work at a dirty and rat-infested shoe-blacking factory. The change in circumstances gave him what his biographer, Michael Slater, describes as a "deep personal and social outrage", which heavily influenced his writing and outlook.
By the end of 1842 Dickens was a well-established author with six major works as well as several short stories, novellas and other pieces. On 31 December that year he began publishing his novel Martin Chuzzlewit as a monthly serial; it was his favourite work, but sales were disappointing and he faced temporary financial difficulties.
Celebrating the Christmas season had been growing in popularity through the Victorian era. The Christmas tree was introduced in Britain during the 18th century, and its use was popularised by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. In the early 19th century there had been a revival of interest in Christmas carols, following a decline in popularity over the previous hundred years.
Dickens had an interest in Christmas, and his first story on the subject was "Christmas Festivities", published in Bell's Weekly Messenger in 1835; the story was then published as "A Christmas Dinner" in Sketches by Boz (1836). "The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton", another Christmas story, appeared in the 1836 novel The Pickwick Papers. In the episode, a Mr. Wardle describes a misanthropic sexton, Gabriel Grub, who undergoes a Christmas conversion after being visited by goblins who show him the past and future. Slater considers that "the main elements of the Carol are present in the story", but not yet in a firm form. The story is followed by a passage about Christmas in Dickens's editorial Master Humphrey's Clock. The professor of English literature Paul Davis writes that although the "Goblins" story appears to be a prototype of A Christmas Carol, all Dickens's earlier writings about Christmas influenced the story.
Social Influences
Dickens was touched by the lot of poor children in the middle decades of the 19th century. In early 1843 he toured the Cornish tin mines, where he was angered by seeing children working in appalling conditions. The suffering he witnessed there was reinforced by a visit to the Field Lane Ragged School, one of several London schools set up for the education of the capital's half-starved, illiterate street children.
In February 1843 the Second Report of the Children's Employment Commission was published. It was a parliamentary report exposing the effects of the Industrial Revolution upon working class children. Horrified by what he read, Dickens planned to publish an inexpensive political pamphlet tentatively titled, An Appeal to the People of England, on behalf of the Poor Man's Child, but changed his mind, deferring the pamphlet's production until the end of the year. In March he wrote to Dr Southwood Smith, one of the four commissioners responsible for the Second Report, about his change in plans: "you will certainly feel that a Sledge hammer has come down with twenty times the force—twenty thousand times the force—I could exert by following out my first idea".
In a fundraising speech on 5 October 1843 at the Manchester Athenaeum, Dickens urged workers and employers to join together to combat ignorance with educational reform, and realised in the days following that the most effective way to reach the broadest segment of the population with his social concerns about poverty and injustice was to write a deeply felt Christmas narrative rather than polemical pamphlets and essays.
Dickens at the blacking warehouse, as envisioned by Fred Barnard
Publication
He began A Christmas Carol in October 1843. Michael Slater, Dickens's biographer, describes the book as being "written at white heat"; it was completed in six weeks, the final pages being written in early December. He built much of the work in his head while taking night-time walks of 15 to 20 miles around London. Dickens's sister-in-law wrote how he "wept, and laughed, and wept again, and excited himself in a most extraordinary manner, in composition".
Slater says that A Christmas Carol was intended to open its readers' hearts towards those struggling to survive on the lower rungs of the economic ladder and to encourage practical benevolence, but also to warn of the terrible danger to society created by the toleration of widespread ignorance and actual want among the poor.
George Cruikshank, the illustrator who had earlier worked with Dickens on Sketches by Boz (1836) and Oliver Twist (1838), introduced him to the caricaturist John Leech. By 24 October Dickens invited Leech to work on A Christmas Carol, and four hand-coloured etchings and four black-and-white wood engravings by the artist accompanied the text. Dickens's hand-written manuscript of the story does not include the sentence in the penultimate paragraph "... and to Tiny Tim, who did not die"; this was added later, during the printing process.
As the result of the disagreements with Chapman and Hall over the commercial failures of Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens arranged to pay for the publishing himself, in exchange for a percentage of the profits. Production of A Christmas Carol was not without problems. The first printing was meant to have festive green endpapers, but they came out a dull olive colour. Dickens's publisher Chapman and Hall replaced these with yellow endpapers and reworked the title page in harmonising red and blue shades. The final product was bound in red cloth with gilt-edged pages, completed only two days before the publication date of 19 December 1843. Following publication, Dickens arranged for the manuscript to be bound in red Morocco leather and presented as a gift to his solicitor, Thomas Mitton.
Priced at five shillings (equivalent to £31 in 2023), the first run of 6,000 copies sold out by Christmas Eve. Chapman and Hall issued second and third editions before the new year, and the book continued to sell well into 1844. By the end of 1844 eleven more editions had been released. Since its initial publication the book has been issued in numerous hardback and paperback editions, translated into several languages and has never been out of print. It was Dickens's most popular book in the United States, and sold over two million copies in the hundred years following its first publication there.
