A Christmas Carol

• 1. Introduction

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  A Christmas Carol was published on the 19th of December 1843, and by Christmas Eve the entire first run of 6,000 copies had sold out. Charles Dickens wrote it in six weeks, completing the final pages in early December, after taking night-time walks of 15 to 20 miles around London while building much of the work in his head. His sister-in-law recorded how he "wept, and laughed, and wept again, and excited himself in a most extraordinary manner, in composition." The book that emerged from that feverish period has never been out of print. What drove a celebrated author to drop everything and produce a ghost story about a miser? What was burning in Dickens that six weeks of composition could not cool? And how did a slim illustrated novella come to reshape the way an entire civilization celebrates a holiday?

• 2. The Making of Scrooge

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  Ebenezer Scrooge is described in the story as "a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner." The character may have drawn on two real-life misers: the eccentric John Elwes, a Member of Parliament, and Jemmy Wood, owner of the Gloucester Old Bank, known as "The Gloucester Miser." According to the sociologist Frank W. Elwell, Scrooge's attitudes toward the poor reflect those of the demographer and political economist Thomas Malthus.

  Dickens's biographer Michael Slater suggests Scrooge may also carry traces of Dickens's own conflicted feelings about his father. The professor Robert Douglas-Fairhurst reads the lonely, aspiring young Scrooge as "something of a self-parody of Dickens's fears about himself," while the generous, sociable Scrooge after transformation represents how Dickens optimistically saw himself.

  Even the name may have a strange origin. Dickens had visited Edinburgh and reportedly saw a tombstone for one Ebenezer Lennox Scroggie, whose occupation was listed as a meal man, a corn merchant. Dickens is said to have misread the inscription as "mean man." Scholars have called this theory "a probable Dickens hoax" for which "no one could find any corroborating evidence." The name for Scrooge's partner Marley may trace to a tradesman's sign near where Dickens once lived, reading "Goodge and Marney."

• 3. Children in Chains

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  In early 1843 Dickens toured the Cornish tin mines and was angered by the sight of children working in appalling conditions. A visit to the Field Lane Ragged School in London, one of several establishments for the capital's half-starved, illiterate street children, deepened his outrage. In February 1843, the Second Report of the Children's Employment Commission was published, a parliamentary document exposing the effects of the Industrial Revolution on working-class children.

  Horrified by the report, Dickens initially planned a political pamphlet to be titled An Appeal to the People of England, on behalf of the Poor Man's Child. In March he wrote to Dr Southwood Smith, one of the four commissioners responsible for the report, explaining his change of approach: "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."

  At a fundraising speech on the 5th of October 1843 at the Manchester Athenaeum, Dickens urged workers and employers to combat ignorance through educational reform. In the days that followed, he concluded that a Christmas narrative would reach a broader audience than any pamphlet. The two allegorical figures sheltering in the robes of the Ghost of Christmas Present, named Ignorance and Want, were drawn directly from the children he had seen at a ragged school in the East End of London.

• 4. A Book Under Pressure

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  By mid-1843 sales of Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens's monthly serial that had begun on the 31st of December 1842, were falling. His wife Catherine was pregnant with their fifth child. Chapman and Hall, his publishers, threatened to reduce his monthly income by £50 if sales declined further. Dickens began A Christmas Carol in October 1843.

  He arranged to pay the publishing costs himself in exchange for a percentage of the profits, a decision that would cost him dearly. The illustrator John Leech, introduced to Dickens by George Cruikshank, was invited to work on the book by the 24th of October; Leech produced four hand-coloured etchings and four black-and-white wood engravings. Production ran into difficulties. The first printing was meant to have festive green endpapers, but they came out a dull olive colour. Chapman and Hall replaced them with yellow endpapers and reworked the title page in red and blue. The final product, bound in red cloth with gilt-edged pages, was completed only two days before the publication date.

  The high production costs Dickens insisted upon gutted his returns. Priced at five shillings, the first edition brought him only £230, against the £1,000 he expected. A year later, total profits stood at only £744. Dickens was deeply disappointed, and the episode strained his relationship with Chapman and Hall to breaking point, eventually leading him to move to the printers Bradbury and Evans.

• 5. The Piracy and Its Price

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  In January 1844, Parley's Illuminated Library published an unauthorised condensed version of the story and sold it for twopence. Dickens wrote to his solicitor, declaring "I have not the least doubt that if these Vagabonds can be stopped they must" and calling for a swift legal response: "Let us be the sledge-hammer in this, or I shall be beset by hundreds of the same crew when I come out with a long story."

  Two days after the Parley version appeared, Dickens sued on the grounds of copyright infringement and won. The publishers promptly declared themselves bankrupt, leaving Dickens to pay £700 in legal costs himself. The novella he had produced to rescue his finances had instead deepened them.

  Contemporary reviewers, meanwhile, were almost uniformly warm. The Illustrated London News praised its "unfeigned lightness of heart." The Athenaeum called it "a tale to make the reader laugh and cry... a dainty dish to set before a King." William Makepeace Thackeray, writing in Fraser's Magazine, called the book "a national benefit" and reported that two women he had spoken to, neither knowing the other or the author, had both responded to it simply by saying "God bless him."

• 6. Reading to the Crowds

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  During Christmas 1853 Dickens gave a reading of A Christmas Carol in Birmingham Town Hall to the Industrial and Literary Institute. He insisted that tickets for working-class attendees be set at quarter-price. Initially he donated the profits from such readings to good causes, but from 1858 he read the book for profit.

  He read the tale in an abbreviated version 127 times in total, right up until 1870, the year of his death, including at his farewell performance. Each reading took three hours. The response was so powerful that in 1867 one American businessman, after attending a reading, closed his factory on Christmas Day and sent every employee a turkey.

  Three theatrical stage productions opened on the 5th of February 1844, one by Edward Stirling, titled A Christmas Carol; or, Past, Present, and Future, which received Dickens's endorsement and ran for more than 40 nights. By the close of February that year, eight rival productions of the story were playing simultaneously in London. In 1901 the story was produced as a silent British film titled Scrooge, or, Marley's Ghost, one of the first known screen adaptations of any Dickens work, though it is now largely lost. The story was adapted for BBC radio in 1923, and has since been produced as opera, ballet, animation, stage musicals, and a BBC mime production starring Marcel Marceau.

• 7. Language Absorbed Into Culture

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  The phrase "Merry Christmas" had existed in English for centuries; the earliest known written use appears in a letter from 1534. Dickens's use of the phrase in A Christmas Carol popularised it among the Victorian public in a way it had not been before. The exclamation "Bah! Humbug!" entered common use as a retort to anything sentimental or festive. The name "Scrooge" became a general word for a miser and was added to the Oxford English Dictionary as such in 1982.

  The effects on individual readers could be startling. In early 1844, The Gentleman's Magazine attributed a rise in charitable giving in Britain to the novella. In 1874, Robert Louis Stevenson, after reading Dickens's Christmas books, vowed to give generously to those in need. Thomas Carlyle hosted two Christmas dinners after reading A Christmas Carol. In the early years of the 20th century, Maud of Wales, the Queen of Norway, sent gifts to London's crippled children signed "With Tiny Tim's Love."

  The author G. K. Chesterton wrote of the story: "The beauty and blessing of the story... lie in the great furnace of real happiness that glows through Scrooge and everything around him.... Whether the Christmas visions would or would not convert Scrooge, they convert us." Ruth Glancy, professor of English literature, holds that the largest impact of the novella was felt by exactly these individual readers, one by one, across generations.

• 8. A Story That Shifts With Its Times

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  Paul Davis, who studies the adaptations of A Christmas Carol, distinguishes between Dickens's original text and what he calls the "remembered version," noting that certain scenes Dickens wrote, such as Scrooge's visits to miners and lighthouse keepers, have faded from popular memory, while events often added in adaptations, such as Scrooge visiting the Cratchits on Christmas Day, are now widely assumed to be part of the original.

  Victorian audiences read the tale as a spiritual but secular parable. By the early 20th century it had become a children's story, passed between generations of parents and grandparents. During the Great Depression, Davis notes, some read it as a denunciation of capitalism, while most turned to it as an escape from economic hardship. British films of the 1930s offered traditional tellings; American productions placed Bob Cratchit at the centre, framing the story as a celebration of what Davis calls "the Christmas of the common man." In the 1960s, Scrooge was sometimes portrayed as a Freudian figure working through his past. By the 1980s he was again placed in a world of depression and economic uncertainty.

  Not all readings have been admiring. The novelist William Dean Howells, writing in 1891, judged the "pathos appears false and strained; the humor largely horseplay; the characters theatrical; the joviality pumped." James Joyce thought Dickens took a childish approach, creating a gap between naive optimism and the realities of life. The historian Ronald Hutton's summary may be the most durable: Dickens "linked worship and feasting, within a context of social reconciliation," and in doing so bound the holiday to the hearth in a way that still holds.