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n By the turn of the nineteenth century, many of thentraditional English Christmas customs were in decline. Industrialization hadnseverely affected Public Holidays, as mill and factory owners were opposed tongranting their workers all the usual feast-day holidays. In 1761, the Bank ofnEngland closed for 47 days, which had dropped to 40 in 1825 and to 18 by 1830.nThe number of observed holidays fell dramatically to 4 in 1834 and the 1833nFactory Act restricted the legal right of British workers to a mere two daysnholiday other than Sundays – Christmas and Good Friday. Other changes in socialnand religious practices wore away at the observance of Christmas and many old,ntraditional customs had never really recovered from the depredations of thenPuritans in the 1640s and 1650s. Many people were concerned by the losses –nfolklorists, historians, poets, musicologists and so forth, and efforts werenmade to preserve and perhaps even revive what was being lost, a spirit notnrestricted to Christmas. The Oxford Movement campaigned for reforms in thenChurch by promoting a return to ritual, decoration and observance of old feastndays, for example.
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| Charles Dickens |
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nIt is a moot point if Charles Dickens was working withinnthis zeitgeist or if he was one of the originators of the sentiment, but he wasncertainly extremely influential in the promotion of traditional Christmasncustoms. In 1843, Dickens toured a Ragged School in London and was greatlynaffected by what he saw there and in September of the same year he travelled tonManchester on a fund-raising event for the Athenaeum, an organisation that wasndedicated to the education of workers. He spoke about the links between povertynand ignorance, and the germ of an idea was born in his imagination. Dickens hadnexperienced extreme poverty as a boy and was an active social reformer in hisnadult life and, coupled to floundering sales of his serialised novel MartinnChuzzlewit and needing money as his wife was pregnant, he worked throughoutnOctober and November to write new two episodes of Chuzzlewit and a newnshort story with a Christmas theme.
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| Charles Dickens – A Christmas Carol – 1843 |
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nA Christmas Carol appeared in latenDecember 1843, and sold the entire first edition of six thousand copies in fivendays. It was an immediate critical success but it was not exactly the financialngodsend that Dickens had hoped for. There was a vogue at the time for ‘colourednplate’ novels and Dickens followed the fashion, paying for the first editionnhimself, a foolscap octavo volume of 160 pages with four hand-coloured platesnand four woodcuts by John Leech, tastefully bound in red cloth, with gilt edgednpages; it sold for five shillings (the equivalent of about £20 today).
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| Charles Dickens – Title Page – A Christmas Carol – 1843 |
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nThe costnof production and printing ate into the profits and Dickens only received £230nrather than the £1,000 he had been led to expect. The second and third editionsnalso sold well, bringing Dickens’s earnings to £726, but it was his first andnlast experience with coloured plates.
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| Scrooge snuffs out the first spirit |
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nBy March 1844, A Christmas Carolnwas in its sixth edition and Dickens began to receive appreciativencorrespondence from his readers, who told him that they liked to read the worknat family gatherings.
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| Mr Fezziwig’s Ball |
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nIn December 1853, he read the novel aloud in public at ancharity benefit for the Midland Institute in Birmingham Town Hall and wasnafterwards asked by many other charities to repeat the reading. He compliednwith the requests but also began public readings for which he charged annadmission fee. He adapted A Christmas Carol into an abridged form, whichnhe virtually memorised although he kept a copy with him on stage, and whichnlasted about two hours, and he later included sections from his other works,nand these readings were a welcome second source of income.
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| Marley’s Ghost |
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nHe toured Americanwith a well-received series of public readings and continued with the showsnuntil March 15th 1870, when he announced that that night’s readingnof A Christmas Carol would be his last – he died three months later.
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| The Spirits of the Air |
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nThenplot of the novel is familiar enough, with the characters of Ebenezer Scrooge,nMarley’s ghost, Mr Fezziwig, Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim remaining alive in thenpublic imagination, but although many readers today see the story as a moralntale, Dickens was reviving, and contributing to, an English tradition ofnChristmas ghost stories – the full title is A Christmas Carol in Prose,nBeing a Ghost Story of Christmas, and Dickens encouraged his readers tonapproach his book as a ghost story, urging them to read it in a cold room litnonly by a single candle. How can you not feel a shiver from that magnificentnopening line, “Marley was dead: to begin with.”
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| Ignorance and Want |
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nThat is not to say thatnit is not a moral tale – it most assuredly is just that. The ghostly childrennthat lurk beneath the cloak of the Ghost of Christmas Present are named Ignorancenand Want, in a return to Dickens’s theme of his speech for the Athenaeumnin Manchester. The transformation of Scrooge from selfish miser into charitablenphilanthropist stands for the possibility of a transformation of society, wherenthe haves support the have-nots and employers take an active interest in thenwell being of their employees and their families.
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| Scrooge’s Third Visitor |
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nIt is in the tradition ofnChristian charity, although Dickens himself was not a particularly religiousnman and felt that the organised religions of his day were out of touch and notnfulfilling their charitable duties to their fullest extent (fancy that!). Henwas criticised in some quarters for not including a more religious element intonthe story, Jesus and his birth are not mentioned at all, but the story is aboutnhuman charity and the redemption of individuals.
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| The Last of the Spirits |
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nCharles Dickens tried tonrepeat the success of the 1843 novel in subsequent years, publishing ThenChimes in 1844, The Cricket on the Hearth in 1845, The Battle ofnLife in 1846 and The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain in 1848,nbut none were as popular as the original and Dickens himself had doubts aboutntheir merit.
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| Old Scrooge – a play inspired by A Christmas Carol |
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nThe story has, of course, inspired numerous adaptations, plays,nreadings, films and television versions since but none really catch the spiritnof the original (although the 1951 film Scrooge, with Alastair Sim innthe title role, is perhaps the best film version of any of Dickens’s books andnis a classic in its own right), and the best advice I can offer is that you gonout and buy two copies of A Christmas Carol. Keep one copy and read itnyourself every December and give the other copy to someone you love. And, asnTiny Tim says, ‘God Bless Us, Every One’.
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| A Reformed Scrooge and Bob Cratchit |
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