History of A Christmas Carol: Being a Ghost Story of Christmas
Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim, A Christmas Carol
HISTORY OF A CHRISTMAS CAROL
Charles Dickens’ novella A Christmas Carol was published in London on December 19, 1843. The first edition sold out by Christmas Eve.
No other book or story by Dickens or anyone else (except the Bible) has been more enjoyed, referred to, criticized, or more frequently adapted to other media forms: theatre, opera, radio, film, TV, or comics. It has never been out of print.
How did Dickens reshape what we now consider a “traditional Christmas,” how did his novella revive Christmas socially and emotionally, and how does the ghost story help achieve that goal?
Redefining Christmas
More than a beloved seasonal tale, A Christmas Carol helped revive a faded holiday, reshape it for an industrial age, and anchor Christmas in the home and family. By combining social critique, domestic warmth, and the Victorian love of ghost stories, Dickens created a work that permanently altered how Christmas is celebrated and imagined.
Living Room at Dickens’ house, London
None of Dickens’ other works is more widely recognized or celebrated in the English-speaking world. Some scholars have even claimed that, in publishing A Christmas Carol, Dickens single-handedly invented the modern form of the Christmas holiday in England and the United States.
Indeed, the great British thinker G. K. Chesterton noted long ago that with A Christmas Carol, Dickens transformed Christmas from a sacred festival into a family feast. In so doing, he brought the holiday inside the home. Thus, he made it accessible to ordinary people, who could now participate directly in the celebration rather than merely witnessing its performance in church.
Several years ago, I wrote about the life of Charles Dickens on the anniversary of his 200th birthday here.
A Traditional Christmas
Fezziwig’s Ball
When Americans talk about “traditional” Christmas, many of our conceptions come from the Victorian period, when Dickens lived. Queen Victoria of England had married less than three years before the publication of this book, the same year Christmas cards were first sent.
Her German husband, Prince Albert, popularized some of his native customs in England (including the Christmas tree), helping establish the traditions of Victorian Christmas. Dickens’ book popularized that style of celebrating Christmas in England and around the world at the time, including family gatherings, seasonal food and drink, dancing, games, and a festive spirit of generosity.
Decline of Christmas
In the mid-seventeenth century, the Puritan Cromwellian Commonwealth abolished the monarchy and the celebration of Christmas in England. Though the monarchy was subsequently “restored,” the winter holiday traditions had never quite recovered. However, the earlier religious prohibition was not the only cause of Christmas’ decline.
Even by the beginning of the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution, especially in the north of England, had changed the communities that still tenuously preserved the customs of their ancestors.
When A Christmas Carol was written in 1843, the past’s lavish celebrations were a distant, quaint memory.
Some still remembered them, and even before the Carol, a few popular books attempted to record past celebrations, such as The Book of Christmas by T.H. Hervey (1837) and The Keeping of Christmas at Bracebridge Hall by Washington Irving (1820). Dickens may have taken some inspiration from them.
But social forces beyond simple nostalgia were at work, rekindling the need for winter celebrations.
Christmas Revival from A Christmas Carol
A Christmas Carol, with illustrations by John Leech
By the 1840s, Christmas had become a pale shadow of its former self – remembered more in books than in practice. It was into this cultural vacuum that Dickens introduced A Christmas Carol.
Some have called the book a “sledgehammer” against the ills of industrialism and consumerism. Dickens’ own father had been sent to London’s Marshalsea debtors’ prison. Charles Dickens bitterly remembered having to leave school, pawn his collection of books, and work in a boot-blacking factory near Covent Garden at the age of 12. He’d seen children working long hours in the tin mines and attending poor schools.
He modeled Bob Cratchit’s lifestyle on his own experiences living in Camden Town, London. Dickens demonstrates that even in poverty, the winter holiday can inspire goodwill and generosity toward one’s neighbors. He shows that the spirit of Christmas was not lost in the race to industrialize, but can live on in our modern world.
Dickens was one of the first to show his readers a new way of celebrating the old holiday in their modern lives. His Christmas celebrations of the Carol adapted the twelve-day manorial (Yule) feast to a one-day party any family could hold in their own urban home.
Instead of gathering together an entire village or a country manor, Dickens showed his readers the celebration of Fred, Scrooge’s nephew, with his immediate family and close friends. He also showed the Cratchit “nuclear family”: perfectly happy alone, without the presence of friends or wider family. He showed the urban, industrial English that they could still celebrate Christmas, even though the old manorial twelve-day celebrations were out of their reach. Dickens’ version of the holiday evoked the childhood memories of people who had moved to the cities as adults.
Ghost Stories in A Christmas Carol
Scrooge’s third visitor
The telling of melodramatic ghost stories, especially around Christmas, was widespread during the Victorian period. Dickens’ fascination with ghost stories, mesmerism, and spiritualism led him to include ghostly apparitions in his other works. Dickens had considered writing a non-fiction piece decrying the evil of poverty and ignorance.
But he decided to frame his argument in the form of a ghost story, allowing him to capture not only the past, present, and future nature of Christmas, but also permitting Scrooge and the reader to confront time, memory, and the consequences of current actions.
As a teenager, Dickens’s favorite was the penny weekly magazine The Terrific Register, which covered murder and ghosts. Reading it, he said he would “make myself unspeakably miserable and frighten my very wits out of my head.”
This novella’s original title was
“A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost-Story of Christmas.”
Initial Publication of A Christmas Carol
A Christmas Carol poster
At the age of 31, Dickens undertook writing A Christmas Carol. He wrote it in 6 weeks. Insomnia was a recurring problem for Dickens, and his remedy was to take nighttime walks, or “perambulations” of 10 to 12 miles around the streets and back alleys of London. This may have played a part in building much of the novella in his head in such a short period.
The publishing of his book, which he paid for himself, was immensely popular – its initial printing of 6,000 copies sold out in days, by Christmas Eve – and within six months, it sold out its seventh edition. By 1860, its thirteenth edition had been published.
A Christmas Carol is generally associated with the Christian winter holiday season, as it contains references to Christ from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, as when Bob Cratchit describes Tiny Tim saying it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day…
“who made lame beggars walk
and blind men see.”
At the end of the story, we see both lame Tiny Tim and blind Scrooge touched by the Spirit of Christmas. It is the story of “the covetous old sinner,” Scrooge’s redemption and transformation. Nevertheless, the story’s themes are not exclusive to Christianity. It inspired a tradition in Christmas books and celebrations for decades that appealed to many non-Christians as well, encouraging the virtues of brotherhood, kindness, and generosity. Dickens advocated that at Christmas, people should think of others, especially the poor and the unfortunate.
Public Performances of A Christmas Carol
It was quickly adapted to the stage in less than two months, and Dickens himself would read it during his speaking tours. One of my favorite versions was seeing Patrick Stewart perform his one-man stage adaptation at the Old Vic Theatre in London in the early ’90s.
His first public reading was on December 27, 1853, at Birmingham Town Hall to an audience of around 2,000, to raise funds for the Birmingham and Midland Institute. Following the reading, “the whole assembly rose spontaneously” to cheer Dickens.
Blue plaque at Birmingham Town Hall, honoring Dickens
His public readings proved so successful that he undertook 127 further three-hour abbreviated performances, including a speaking tour of America, for the rest of his life.
Dickens public reading
He died in 1870, at age 58, about a month after his last public reading of A Christmas Carol.
Following a small, strictly private funeral of a dozen people, a small stone was placed to mark his grave in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey, London. Thousands of people from all walks of life came to pay their respects.
Bookends
More than a seasonal entertainment, A Christmas Carol endures because it reshaped how people understand generosity, family, and moral responsibility during the darkest days of the year. Dickens’ preface to the book reads:
I have endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it.
– Their faithful Friend and Servant, C.D., December, 1843.
But the finale to the book is the very last sentence, which rarely fails to bring a tear to the eye of this historian:
It was always said of Scrooge, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed,
God Bless Us, Every One!
Bill Petro, your friendly neighborhood historian
billpetro.com
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The basis of this novel was the Anglican Lectionary. Dickens was a devout Anglican. How can you say that it wasn’t based on Christianity?
I didn’t say it wasn’t based on Christianity how did you infer that? Indeed, wait for my article on the upcoming 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens.