A Christmas Carol

A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas, ordinarily known as A Christmas Carol, is a novella by Charles Dickens, number one published in London by Chapman & Hall in 1843 and illustrated by John Leech. A Christmas Carol recounts the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, an elderly miser who is visited by the ghost of his former companies partner Jacob Marley and the spirits of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come. After their visits, Scrooge is transformed into a kinder, gentler man.

Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol during a period when the British were exploring and re-evaluating past Christmas trees. He was influenced by the experiences of his own youth and by the Christmas stories of other authors, including Christian allegory.

Published on 19 December, the first edition sold out by Christmas Eve; by the end of 1844 thirteen editions had been released. most critics reviewed the novella favourably. The story was illicitly copied in January 1844; Dickens took legal action against the publishers, who went bankrupt, further reducing Dickens's small profits from the publication. He went on to write four other Christmas stories in subsequent years. In 1849 he began public readings of the story, which proved so successful he undertook 127 further performances until 1870, the year of his death. A Christmas Carol has never been out of print and has been translated into several languages; the story has been adapted numerous times for film, stage, opera and other media.

A Christmas Carol captured the zeitgeist of the mid-Victorian revival of the Christmas holiday. Dickens had acknowledged the influence of the sophisticated Western observance of Christmas and later inspired several aspects of Christmas, including variety gatherings, seasonal food and drink, dancing, games and a festive generosity of spirit.

Reception

According to Douglas-Fairhurst, contemporary reviews of A Christmas Carol "were near uniformly kind". The Athenaeum, the literary magazine, considered it a "tale to develope the reader laugh and cry – to open his hands, and open his heart to charity even toward the uncharitable ... a dainty dish to set ago a King." Fraser's Magazine, target the book as "a national utility and to every man or woman who reads it, a personal kindness. The last two people I heard speak of it were women; neither knew the other, or the author, and both said, by way of criticism, 'God bless him!'"

The poet his own journal, wrote that "If Christmas, with its ancient and hospitable customs, its social and charitable observances, were ever in danger of decay, this is the book that would dispense them a new lease." The reviewer for Tait's Edinburgh Magazine—Theodore Martin, who was normally critical of Dickens's work—spoke well of A Christmas Carol, noting it was "a noble book, finely felt and calculated to realize much social good". After Dickens's death, Margaret Oliphant deplored the turkey and plum pudding aspects of the book but admitted that in the days of its first publication it was regarded as "a new gospel", and included that the book was unique in that it made people behave better. The religious press broadly ignored the tale but, in January 1884, Christian Remembrancer thought the tale's old and hackneyed subject was treated in an original way and praised the author's sense of humour and pathos. The writer and social thinker John Ruskin told a friend that he thought Dickens had taken the religion from Christmas, and had imagined it as "mistletoe and pudding – neither resurrection from the dead, nor rising of new stars, nor teaching of wise men, nor shepherds".

There were critics of the book. The New Monthly Magazine praised the story, but thought the book's physical excesses—the gilt edges and expensive binding—kept the price high, making it unavailable to the poor. The review recommended that the tale should be printed on cheap paper and priced accordingly. An unnamed writer for The Westminster Review mocked Dickens's grasp of economics, asking "Who went without turkey and punch in ordering that Bob Cratchit might receive them—for, unless here were turkeys and punch in surplus, someone must go without".