On 19 December 1843, a small book appeared in shops that altered the public perception of Christmas forever. Written in a burst of ferocious energy a few weeks earlier, A Christmas Carol was a handsomely bound little volume with four hand-coloured illustrations by John Leech.
Charles Dickens plunged his pretty gift book into the intensely competitive Christmas market, jostling on the bookshop shelves with such attractive annuals as The Keepsake, alluringly bound in scarlet dress silk, protected from customers’ dusty fingers by an elaborately printed card sleeve.
To make his own book distinctive, Dickens chose a deep pink vertical-ribbed cloth, with an elaborate gilt wreath on the front cover. He originally asked for the half-title and title page to be printed in Christmas colours of red and green, and the endpapers coloured green to match, but the green ink looked bilious, and the colour rubbed off the endpapers, so he compromised on red and blue printing and yellow endpapers. Reasonably priced at five shillings, the book was too expensive to produce and earned Dickens only moderate profits. Furious arguments with his publishers, Chapman and Hall, over these awkward facts led to a rupture in his relationship with them.
The Original Christmas Best-Seller
From the first, A Christmas Carol proved a sensational success. The story of miserly Scrooge’s conversion to benevolence by supernatural means and the saving of the poor, physically disabled child, Tiny Tim, was hailed almost universally. When Dickens ventured out from private entertainments onto the public stage, it was A Christmas Carol he read from. His first public reading took place in December 1853 in Birmingham, at the new Industrial and Literary Institute, where Dickens insisted “working people” be admitted free, to sit among the “middling classes” and hear him read the Christmas story intended to open readers’ hearts towards those struggling to survive on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder. From then to the end of his life, extracts from A Christmas Carol stayed in his performing repertoire.
Novel Traditions
Most people agree Dickens’ book played a huge part in the invention of modern Christmas celebrations, and it is noticeable that A Christmas Carol describes many of the familiar features of our modern Christmas. The Ghost of Christmas Present looks very like Santa Claus in Leech’s illustration, though his fur-trimmed coat is green rather than the canonical red established by American artists from Thomas Nast onwards (and not, contrary to urban myth, by the Coca Cola Company). The Cratchits make their affordable Christmas dinner of roast goose with apple sauce, mashed potatoes, and gravy, followed by Christmas pudding flamed with brandy, and chestnuts roasted by an open fire. In his redeemed state, Scrooge buys them a turkey so large it needs a cab to deliver it. But there is no Christmas tree of the sort that Prince Albert would soon make popular, and only passing references to Christmas gifts and toys.
Dickens could not keep up the hectic schedule of an annual Christmas story. He managed five more books over the next six years, The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life, and The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain, only taking one year off in 1847 to concentrate on Dombey and Son. For most Dickens enthusiasts, a complete set of his Christmas books is a highly desirable centrepiece to any collection of his first editions. But a set in fine original condition, as published, never appears perfectly uniform, because the other four books were bound in a more conventional deep red cloth, though still with gilt decorations on the front covers. Dickens persuaded his printers, Bradbury and Evans, to become his new publishers, and kept costs down by eschewing hand-coloured illustrations, while the price remained at five shillings.
Ghostly Storytelling during Wintry Nights
The subtitle of A Christmas Carol is “A Ghost Story of Christmas”, and Dickens never lost his enthusiasm for a tale of spirits and spooks suitable for telling round the fireside on dark winter nights. He kept the tradition alive in the Christmas numbers of his literary magazines, Household Words and All the Year Round, which ran from 1850 onwards, writing a few himself, of which the best known is probably “No. 1 Branch Line, The Signalman”, and farming out the composition of others to members of his literary circle.
Dickens did not invent every facet of the modern Christmas, but he cemented several elements of it in the public imagination. With concerns about social inequality returning to dominate public debate, just as they did in Victorian England, A Christmas Carol still has a powerful charge today.
