Books That Changed the World by Andrew Taylor

Author:Andrew Taylor [Taylor, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quercus Publishing
Published: 2014-09-10T04:00:00+00:00

A Christmas Carol

1843

Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens is probably Britain’s most influential and popular novelist, and A Christmas Carol, the novella written over a period of two months in 1843, became one of his best-loved books. Although it develops many of the themes that run through his novels, such as poverty, philanthropy, the role of the family and the social evils of Victorian Britain, it is far from typical of his work. But this short book laid the foundations for the traditional Christmas celebration and, in A Christmas Carol, Dickens himself became the continuing Spirit of Christmas Present.

Charles Dickens (1812–70) wrote well over a dozen full-length novels that are still widely read today. A Christmas Carol is uncharacteristic of his output in that it is less than 30,000 words long – under a tenth of the length of Bleak House or David Copper field. It was written at a time when Dickens urgently needed money: with great novels like Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby and The Old Curiosity Shop behind him, he was already a popular and successful author, but he had high living expenses, and his latest fulllength novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, was not making him as much money in its serialized form as he had hoped.

With its intimate tone, pantomime good humour and unashamed sentimentality, A Christmas Carol was a runaway success from the start. It appeared on 17 December 1843, and 6000 copies of the initial print run were sold out by Christmas – although Dickens’s insistence that it should be priced at an affordable five shillings (25 pence) meant that it never made him much money. It was also almost immediately pirated by unscrupulous publishers, further cutting Dickens’s own income from his work. But A Christmas Carol was the first of Dickens’s novels to be presented to audiences at his hugely popular public readings over the next few years, and it was followed by four more short seasonal works (The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life and The Haunted Man), all aimed specifically at the Christmas market.

A Christmas Carol introduces one of Dickens’s most successful characters, the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge, ‘a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner’. As the story opens it is Christmas Eve, and Scrooge, failing to enter into the Christmas spirit, bullies his poverty-stricken young clerk, Bob Cratchit, snarls at his young nephew who has called to wish him Merry Christmas, spurns appeals from two gentlemen collecting for charity, and chases away a carol singer. It is all humbug, he grumbles.

But then during the night, after a visitation from the ghost of his long-dead business partner, Jacob Marley, three spirits appear to him in turn, representing Christmas Past, Christmas Present and Christmas Yet to Come. The spirits show him his own childhood and youth, and then force him to see the sufferings of the poor in the present – including Cratchit’s family, and their crippled child Tiny Tim. Finally they present Scrooge with a vision of the future, in which Tiny Tim dies a sad death, and his own death goes unmourned.

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