Dickens' A Christmas Carol

Dickens' A Christmas Carol was first published on December 19, 1843. Written in a feverish haste during a time when, despite his best-selling author status, and the on-going sales of the serialized Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens was terribly short of money, Dickens managed to write the entire work in six short weeks. The book was an immediate success. Dickens commissioned noted artist John Leech to create four hand-colored etchings and another four black and white wood engravings as illustrations. Dickens also saw to it that the book had an elaborate binding and gilt-edged pages.

A Christmas Carol was an astounding success. The first printing of 6,000 copies sold out in days, and a subsequent printing of 2,000 copies was sold out by the 6th of January. Although the book didn't make nearly enough money to alleviate Dickens' financial problems, its social impact inspired Dickens to write special "Christmas" books for several years, most notably The Chimes and The Cricket on the Hearth.

Despite the absence of immediate commercial success for A Christmas Carol, Dickens did have a very salutary, and ongoing, impact on English society and custom. Dickens began to read his work publicly, using a special version he edited himself for dramatic readings. In fact the initial popularity of the book was such that there were eight stage adaptations in production within months of the book's initial publication.

Dickens, a child of poverty himself, seems to have modeled the Cratchit family's "two up and two down" home on his own childhood home in a Victorian tenement. His social goal in A Christmas Carol was particularly to draw attention to the plight of poor children— allegorically identified in his novel as "This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want." Dickens was a staunch supporter of education as the surest way to end poverty, to the point of being one of the major advocates of the "ragged schools," free schools for poor children.

The long term cultural effects of Dickens' little Christmas book have been profound, so profound that more than one writer as identified Dickens as "the man who invented Christmas," in terms of social customs, and associations about Christmas traditions, ranging from a Christmas turkey, instead of a goose, Christmas games (and caroling) and the perhaps popularizing further the German tradition of the Christmas tree, begun by Queen Victoria.

If you want the Christmas Carol experience for yourself, why not print a copy of the dramatic reading version Dickens himself used, for a family reading? Alternatively, you can read the book— and see the original illustrations here, or listen to Jonathan Winters reading Dickens' dramatic version.