Short answers, pulled from the story.
A Christmas Carol was first published on the 19th of December 1843 by Chapman and Hall in London. The first run of 6,000 copies sold out by Christmas Eve, and by the end of 1844 eleven further editions had been released.
John Leech illustrated A Christmas Carol, producing four hand-coloured etchings and four black-and-white wood engravings. Dickens invited Leech to work on the book by the 24th of October 1843, after Leech had been introduced to him by the illustrator George Cruikshank.
Dickens was moved to write A Christmas Carol after visiting the Field Lane Ragged School in London and touring the Cornish tin mines, where he witnessed children working in harsh conditions. He had planned a political pamphlet on child poverty but decided a Christmas story would reach a far broader audience.
Dickens read A Christmas Carol publicly 127 times between 1849 and 1870, the year of his death. Each reading of the abbreviated version lasted three hours, and his farewell performance included the tale.
The first edition of A Christmas Carol brought Dickens only £230, well below the £1,000 he had expected. A year later, total profits had reached only £744, a result of the high production costs Dickens himself had insisted upon.
The name Scrooge, taken from the central character of A Christmas Carol, entered common use as a word for a miser and was added to the Oxford English Dictionary as such in 1982. Dickens may have taken the name from a tombstone he saw in Edinburgh bearing the name Ebenezer Lennox Scroggie, which he reportedly misread as "mean man."