It may be the most loved Christmas Story ever written. Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was a bestseller when it was published in 1843, and has never been out of print. It has inspired hundreds of stage and film adaptations and has influenced the way people around the world view Christmas. Dickens wrote four other Christmas books in the years following, yet none of them had the same impact. What makes A Christmas Carol so special?
In February of 1843, Charles Dickens and his friend the Baroness Burdett-Coutts became interested in the Ragged Schools, a system of religiously-inspired schools for the poorest children in Britain. Bourdett-Coutts had been asked donate to them, and she requested that Dickens visit the school at Saffron Hill and report back to her. The author, having experienced poverty and child labour himself, was deeply concerned with its elimination, and believed that education was an important way to achieve this. But he was shocked by what he saw at Saffron Hill. “I have seldom seen”, he wrote to Bourdett-Coutts, “in all the strange and dreadful things I have seen in London and elsewhere, anything so shocking as the dire neglect of soul and body exhibited in these children” (Mackenzie, Dickens, pp. 143-44).
All that year the Saffron Hill children stayed in Dickens’ mind, and he briefly considered writing a journalistic piece on their plight. Then in October, while visiting a workingmen’s educational institute in Manchester, he suddenly thought of a way to address in fiction his concerns about poverty & greed, and A Christmas Carol was born. Once back in London, Dickens began writing “at a white heat” (ODNB), telling his friend Cornelius Felton that while composing he “wept and laughed and wept again, and excited himself in a most extraordinary manner… and thinking whereof he walked about the black streets of London, fifteen and twenty miles many a night when all the sober folks had gone to bed” (Letters of Charles Dickens, Macmillan & Co., 1893, pp. 101-02).
It was a deeply personal and cathartic experience. Though Dickens hoped to elicit concern for poor children, represented in the story by Tiny Tim, he also wrote from a darker place. He had grown up poor and was still acutely conscious of money, never feeling comfortable that he had enough (one of the reasons he wrote A Christmas Carol was to increase his earnings during a slow period). And yet he distrusted the instinct to hoard it, and donated much to the needy. It was from these anxieties that he created Ebenezer Scrooge, one of the greatest examples of redemption in all of literature, with a life story remarkably similar to Dickens’. Scrooge is Dickens imagining “what he once was and what he might have become” (Ackroyd, Dickens, p. 412).
Dickens finished writing in only six weeks, though he was also working on Martin Chuzzlewit, and celebrated “like a madman” (Letters, p. 102). He arranged with Chapman & Hall to publish the story on a commission basis, giving him the freedom to design the book to his own high standards. Bound in pinkish-brown cloth, it included elaborate gilt designs on the cover and spine, as well as gilt edges, hand-coloured green endpapers (which were later changed to yellow because the green tended to rub off), four coloured etchings, and four uncoloured engravings. Despite the expense of printing and binding such a volume, the price was set at a low five shillings, which contributed to its popularity.
A copy of the first edition of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (1843).
As soon as it appeared, A Christmas Carol was “a sensational success… greeted with almost universal delight” (ODNB). William Makepeace Thackeray called it, “a national benefit and to every man or woman who reads it a personal kindness” (Fraser’s Magazine, February 1844). Published only a week before Christmas, six thousand copies sold by Christmas Eve, with sales continuing into the New Year and a pirated edition also selling briskly, much to Dickens’ dismay.
A Christmas Carol struck such a chord because it was informed by Dickens’ own troubled life, his ambivalence toward the wealth he was accruing as a successful author, and his deeply held beliefs about goodness, charity, and the sin of institutionalized poverty. His skill as an author was drawing from the world around him, and from within himself, universal themes that have resonated with millions of readers across the years. Indeed, there seems to be something for almost everyone, at every time, in this little book. As the novelist and biographer Peter Ackroyd put it,
A Christmas Carol takes its place among other pieces of radical literature in the same period… But clearly, too, there are many religious motifs which give the book its particular seasonal spirit; not only the Christmas of parties and dancing but also the Christmas of mercy and love… But it combined all these things within a narrative which has all the fancy of a fairy tale and all the vigor of a Dickensian narrative. There was instruction for those who wished to find it at the time of this religious festival, but there was also enough entertainment to render it perfect ‘holiday reading’; it is rather as if Dickens had rewritten a religious tract and filled it both with his own memories and with all the concerns of the period. He had, in other words, created a modern fairy story. And so it has remained. (Ackroyd, p. 413.)
There are many great YouTube clips from film versions of A Christmas Carol. Here’s Patrick Stewart in his acclaimed role as Scrooge, in this scene meeting Marley’s ghost for the first time. And, wonderfully, the 1935 film starring Seymour Hicks is available in its entirety.
First edition of Charles Dickens’s first book, Sketches by Boz (1836).
Happy 200th Birthday to Charles Dickens! Today we’ll look at Dickens’s publishing history and the formats in which his novels originally appeared.
Pictured above, a first edition of Dickens’s very first book, Sketches by Boz. In 1828 the young Dickens had set out to become a freelance journalist, and in 1833 his first literary work, a humorous sketch titled ‘A Dinner at Poplar Walk’ (later retitled ‘Mr. Minns and His Cousin’), appeared in the Monthly Magazine. Additional stories followed, and soon Dickens was writing a regular series for the Evening Chronicle called “Sketches of London”. These were published as Sketches by Boz in 1836. Illustrated by the famous satirist Cruikshank, the sketches “were praised for their humour, wit, touches of pathos, and the ‘startling fidelity’ of their descriptions of London life” (ODNB). The book was so popular that a second printing was required almost immediately.
Dickens’s second book, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, was proposed by the newly formed publishing firm Chapman & Hall. They had planned a series of amusing sketches by an artist named Robert Seymour and asked Dickens to write stories to accompany them. When the original artist committed suicide only a few months into the project a young man named Hablot K. Brown was selected as his replacement. ‘Phiz’, as he became known, would remain Dickens’s preferred illustrator for the next two decades, working on ten of his novels including David Copperfield, Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities, and Bleak House. Pickwick itself was a sensation, achieving a circulation of 40,000, and making its author a literary celebrity.
It also established serialisation as an important publishing format, financially lucrative because it facilitated the build-up of narrative tension and kept the public engaged with the story, while allowing for significant numbers of advertisements in each relatively inexpensive instalment (not unlike television shows). Most of Dickens’s future novels, and those of many other major nineteenth-century writers, would be serialised.
First edition in the original cloth of Oliver Twist (1838).
Following the success of Pickwick, Dickens began his very first novel, Oliver Twist; or The Parish Boy’s Progress. The story was originally published in twenty-four parts in the magazine Bentley’s Miscellany.
The copy pictured above is a first edition, first issue in book form, published by Richard Bentley in 1838 shortly before the completion of the serialised version.
The rush to prepare illustrations for the book version resulted in the inclusion in early copies of “The Fireside Plate”, an illustration of Oliver at Rose Maylie’s knee (volume III, page 313) that Dickens objected to and asked to be replaced. The most collectible copies are those that, like the above, include the Fireside Plate.
First edition of Charles Dickens’s Master Humphrey’s Clock in the original weekly installments.
Following Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby (serialised in 1838 and39), Chapman & Hall experimented with another type of serialisation. Master Humphrey’s Clock was a weekly published between 1840 and 1841 that contained stand-alone short stories as well as instalments of two different novels, The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge. Each issue was composed of a single folded sheet consisting of sixteen pages, of which twelve were numbered pages of letterpress and the others formed the outer wrapper. Every four or five weeks the unsold copies from the past month were gathered and bound together to create the monthly issue bound in green wrappers. When both these periodical issues were complete, the whole was bound in three volumes in purple-brown cloth. The weekly format seen above is the scarcest in commerce.
From then on, Dickens’s long novels (ten more published between 1844 and 1870) first appeared either on their own as monthly instalments, usually in blue-green wrappers and with two illustrations per instalment, or as weekly instalments in one of his own magazines, Household Words and All the Year Round. Pictured below is a copy of David Copperfield in the original monthly parts.
Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield in the original monthly parts (1849–50).
Once the series was complete, readers often had the parts bound together as a book (the final instalment was always issued with a frontispiece, two dated title pages, and sometimes prefatory matter, to be bound at the front of these volumes, so that they were more like official books than collections of pamphlets).
This is why many of our descriptions of Dickens’s novels say “first edition, bound from parts”. A good way to tell if a copy is bound from the original parts is by checking for stab holes, tiny holes in the gutter (the margin adjacent to the spine) left by the needle when the parts were originally bound in wrappers. Novels still in the original parts, like the David Copperfield set above, are much less common than copies of the same books bound from parts.
They’re also important historical artefacts, as the ads can tell us a great deal about Victorian life and the audience for Dickens’s novels. But bound copies are also highly collectable. Below, two examples in contemporary calf bindings:
First edition of Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit, bound from the original parts (1857).
First edition of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, bound from the original parts (1853).
Not all of Dickens’s work first appeared serially. A Christmas Carol, perhaps his most famous creation, was published as a stand-alone novella by Chapman & Hall in 1843. It was written “at a white heat” (ODNB) out of anger at the treatment of the poor, particularly children, and was an instant sensation. First editions in the original cloth, featuring a coloured frontispiece and title page, are uncommon, but an attractive and more easily obtainable facsimile edition was published in 1956. The success of A Christmas Carol led to the publication of four additional “Christmas books”, approximately one a year through 1848.
First edition in the original cloth of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843).
Colour frontispiece and title page from the first edition of A Christmas Carol.
In addition to his fiction, Dickens was known for his voluminous correspondence. Most of this now resides in libraries and archives, but pieces occasionally appear on the market, and we’re lucky enough to have a letter in his hand:
Letter in Charles Dickens’s handwriting. – SOLD
In it, he writes to express his regret that he was unable to attend the funeral of a relative with the surname Culliford (his mother’s maiden name, which he gave to his eldest son Charley as a middle name).
Half-Hours by the Best Authors, presentation copy inscribed to Charles Dickens, with Dickens’s bookplate.
Also of significance for collectors are books from Dickens’s personal library. Above is a set entitled Half-Hours by the Best Authors, a collection of short pieces (each would take half an hour to read) plucked from various books, including a duel scene from Nicholas Nickleby.
The editor, Charles Knight, has inscribed the book to Dickens, whose bookplate appears in each volume. Knight (1791–1873) was a journalist and publisher particularly interested in educating the working-class. He contributed to the first two volumes of Dickens’s Household Words and joined Dickens’s Amateur Company of the Guild, a theatrical group which toured the provinces in 1850–51. In remembrance of that tour, Knight was included among the dedicatees of Bleak House. Below, Dickens’s bookplate as it appears in this set:
Bookplate of Charles Dickens.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this look at Dickens from a rare book perspective. You can view our entire selection of Dickens books here. If you don’t see what you’re looking for, or if you have a first edition or signed book you’d like to sell, please contact us. Below, a selection of other links for the Dickens bicentenary:
Read his biography at the Online Dictionary of National Biography.
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