A Christmas Carol That Almost Wasn't
- cepmurphywrites
- 4 days ago
- 5 min read
By Matthew Kresal.
Christmas time. Presents. Turkey or a piece of poultry on the table for dinner. Stories of redemption and a new found chance of happiness (romantic or otherwise) amid the snows of the holiday season.
All of these are hallmarks across the western world of that time up to and around the 25th of December every year. Many of which can trace their influence back to one particular work published just before Christmas 1843. Called by some “The Second Greatest Christmas Story Ever Told”, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens has spent the last 182 years continually being not only read but adapted, with the name of its protagonist having become a synonym for those greedy and lacking in cheer around the holiday season.
Which makes it all the more remarkable that if events had gone a little differently, Dickens might never have written A Christmas Carol at all.
1843 should have been a good year for Dickens. He had been coming off a slate of popular successes including Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby. A new novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, was being being published in monthly instalments and initially seemed set to be equally successful. However, whereas the monthly instalments of Nickleby had sold somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000 copies, Chuzzlewit ended up selling only around half that number. Dickens decision to try and liven the plot by having Chuzzlewit journey to the United States (as the author had the previous year) did little to increase sales. Worse, its biting satirical portrayal of the country had infuriated readers across the pond, leading to wrathful transatlantic correspondence being aimed at the author.
Chuzzlewit’s lack of success had a more immediate and pressing impact on Dickens: namely on his finances, as his publisher Chapman and Hall reduced his monthly advance by £50 as a result of the comparatively poor sales. Something which came at a time when Dickens wife was expecting the couple’s fifth child, there was a household to support, and family members such as his father that he came to refer to as his “blood petitioners” came begging for money. What Dickens desperately needed was something all authors hope for: a major success.
At the same time, Dickens' conscience on social issues had been piqued. Early in 1843, Dickens had visited the Cornish tin mines and had been appalled by the conditions in which he saw small children working. Around the same time, the Second Report of the Children's Employment Commission was published, reinforcing to Dickens that something had to be done. Dickens was considering writing a pamphlet on the matter soon after the report, but elected to hold off until later in the year.
All of which was working its way around the author’s mind in the autumn of 1843. A hurricane of a creative flop, financial woes, but also a social awareness and wish to contribute something to the public discourse. One that became, ironically, a perfect storm of creativity as Dickens became seized by an idea from his nightly walks around the city.
Dickens began writing his Christmas tale in October. The author’s biographer Michael Slater would describe the six weeks that followed as “a white heat.” The manuscript (of which there was only one copy) was completed on the 2nd of December, barely in time for a publication date ahead of Christmas, with Dickens making edits (including making clear the fate of Tiny Tim) during the printing process. Lavishly illustrated by John Leech and priced at five shillings, the first edition of 6,000 copies sold out by the 24th of December. Though Dickens would not make the thousand pounds he’d immediately hoped for, the money he did earn helped to ease his immediate financial burdens.
The impact that A Christmas Carol had soon extended far beyond Dickens pocketbook. Its impact was felt almost immediately, as evidenced by Francis Jeffrey, editor of the Edinburgh Review, writing to the author shortly after reading Dickens' “little publication” to say that it had “fostered more kindly feelings, and prompted more positive acts of beneficence, than can be traced to all the pulpits and confessionals in Christendom.” Dickens himself would later recall receiving “by every post, all manner of strangers writing all manner of letters about their homes and hearths, and how the Carol is read aloud there, and kept on a very little shelf by itself.”
The Charles Dickens Museum in London told CBS in a 2010 segment on the novel that the book caused an immediate uptake in turkey as a Christmas meal, and it had become enough of a staple to be mentioned in cookbooks by the time Dickens passed away in 1870. The phrases “Merry Christmas,” “bah, humbug!” and referring to someone as a “Scrooge” entered the lexicon. Not all of these were Dickens own invention (“Merry Christmas” as a phrase dates back to at least the 1530s), but he certainly popularized them enough that it’s easy to understand why there’s a 2017 film on Dickens writing of A Christmas Carol with the title The Man Who Invented Christmas.
It’s also had an impact well beyond the printed page. Stage adaptations appeared within a matter of months and Dickens himself began doing public readings of it in 1853. Initially for charity, throughout the 1860s they were a reliable source of income for him with Dickens reading from an edited text meant for listening rather than reading. Dozens of film and television adaptations have followed, with actors ranging from Alastair Sim to George C. Scott, Patrick Stewart, and Jim Carrey having taken on the role of Scrooge. That doesn’t include derivative works that have adapted A Christmas Carol for their own purposes such as the 1988 black comedy Scrooged or the likes of Barbie in a Christmas Carol or the 2010 Doctor Who Christmas special that went so far as to appropriate the title in a tale where the Doctor travels back and forth through time trying to bring about a Scrooge-like transformation in a villain. Then there’s It’s a Wonderful Life, another Christmas classic (and favorite film of later US President Ronald Reagan) which writer Philip Van Doren Stern based its source short story The Greatest Gift in part off of Dickens original tale.
None of which might have happened if a perfect creative storm hadn’t come together for Dickens in 1843.
What about a world without A Christmas Carol? J. Michael Straczynski offered a glimpse of such a possibility with his 1986 episode Xmas Marks the Spot for the animated series The Real Ghostbusters where a time vortex sends the characters back to 1837 London where they inadvertently trap the ghosts before they can convert Scrooge. The Ghostbusters return to a dystopian present day where Scrooge instead led the charge against Christmas, leaving the world is a grayer and angrier place lacking in cheer and with “humbug!” being shouted in the streets.
Something for which, as dark as things might appear at this holiday season we can be thankful for not living in that particular timeline. So as we enjoy the holiday season, let us consider the unlikely mix of a creative flop, financial pressures, and a social conscience that brought about A Christmas Carol. Without it, the Second Greatest Christmas Story Ever Told might never have been.
Matthew Kresal is, among other things, the author of the SLP book Our Man on the Hill and short stories in the anthologies AlloAmericana, The Emerald Isles, and The Scottish Anthology.