A Christmas Carol: A Ghost Story of Christmas

BACKGROUND

Charles Dickens’ novella A Christmas Carol was first published in 1843 under the title A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas. The British author had already written The Pickwick Papers (1837), The Adventures of Oliver Twist (1839), The Life and Times of Nicholas Nickleby (1839), and The Old Curiosity Shop (1941), and would go on to write such other classics as David Copperfield (1850), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and Great Expectations (1861). Unusually, Dickens oversaw most of the publication work on A Christmas Carol himself; the result was a beautifully bound book that sold for just five shillings. It became popular instantly.

Charles John Huffam Dickens was born in Portsmouth, England in 1812, where his father was a clerk for the Navy. At the age of 12, his father was thrown into a debtor’s prison and young Charles went to work at a factory. These experiences impacted his worldview and influenced the focus on poverty and the class system in his novels. By the early 1830’s when his first work was published, Dickens was working as a journalist for The Morning Chronicle newspaper. His work was often published in other periodicals as well, some of it under the nom de plume “Boz.” He married in 1836 and helped raise ten children while keeping up a busy writing schedule. He and his wife separated twenty years later, and he had alleged relations with several other women later in his life. After a series of strokes while he was working on The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Dickens died at his home in 1870. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, in the Poets’ Corner.

In his introduction to The Annotated Christmas Carol, Michael Patrick Hearn notes that large Christmas festivities in the early nineteenth century were on the decline, and that the popularity of Dickens’ holiday tale helped revive the family-oriented traditions that are celebrated today. This little book immediately affected its readers, and created timeless characters like Scrooge and Tiny Tim, whose images were indelibly brought to life by the illustrator John Leech. Leech continued to collaborate with Dickens, illustrating a number of his other works including portions of each of the four Christmas novellas that followed the success of A Christmas Carol.

Beginning in the 1850’s, Dickens often read an edited-down version of A Christmas Carol for his public appearances. Indeed, many others have used this novella as the basis for works on stage and screen. Recent adaptations of A Christmas Carol have included a version with Jim Henson’s muppets, a one-man stage show starring Patrick Stewart, and numerous parody episodes on television shows ranging from The Flintstones to Xena: Warrior Princess. Charleston Stage’s history with A Christmas Carol dates back to the company’s first production in 1978. Since then, it has been produced in various forms over a dozen times, including a recent musical adaptation by Charleston Stage Founder Julian Wiles.

• The majority of Dickens’ novels were first published as weekly or monthly serials in a variety of literary magazines before their debut in book form.
• A Christmas Carol was the first of five Christmas-themed novellas that Dickens would write in the 1840’s. The popularity of the others was eclipsed over time, and A Christmas Carol remains the most widely beloved today.
• The Oxford English Dictionary cites Dickens as the origin of the term “scrooge” as meaning a “miserly, tight-fisted person or killjoy.”