Inventing Scrooge: The Incredible True Story Behind Charles Dickens' Legendary A Christmas Carol
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“How could Scrooge, who upon his transformation embraced being Tiny Tim’s ‘second father,’ have had such an effect as to save Tim? He could have ensured that Tim received a better diet, including fish, dairy products, good quality bread, and more calories. Trips to the countryside would have increased sunshine exposure. Medical specialists could have advised more contemporary and possibly effective orthopedic devices, and, with the curing of rickets, Tim’s limbs may have become straighter,” wrote Dr. Chesney. “We are not told whether he was fully cured, but he definitely survived.”
He had no further intercourse with Spirits, but lived upon the Total Abstinence Principle, ever afterwards; and it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed,
God bless Us, Every One!
EPILOGUE
* * *
Dickens Cuts Loose
It was the very beginning of December. He had finished writing the book in just six weeks.
Once the manuscript for A Christmas Carol was finished, Dickens prepared the book for publication. During the course of writing, Dickens had made hundreds of corrections, scribbles, and cross outs. He had to make sure these all came through properly in the final pages.
Since the book was being distributed by Chapman and Hall, with Dickens producing it, he fiddled constantly with the package. He put a laser focus on the final details. The exterior featured a red case with gold gilt embossing and with the title and Dickens’ name encircled by a wreath of holly, and the edges of the pages were covered in gold gilt. Inside, the endpapers were colored and there were eight illustrative plates throughout. He had spared no expense, so that the book might be as pleasant a property, and might seem as small and gifty as possible. And to make sure the book would fly out of the stores he put the low price of five shillings on it, ensuring its success.
In this new scheme, Dickens was all but assured that if it were a success, he would enjoy the resulting monies all the more. He had borrowed money against it, so sure was he of the book’s power and attractiveness.
Just before publication he received a letter from John Leech, the illustrator, who had drawn the eight art pieces in the book. Leech was unhappy with the color plates, which were hand tinted. Phiz’s son, Edgar Browne, later wrote, “This was a primitive process. Leech of course set the pattern, the copyist would spread out a number of print all around a large table, having a number of saucers ready prepared with the appropriate tints . . . and then would start off and tint all the skies, then all the coats, and so on, till every object was separately colored, and the work was done. The effect was certainly gay, but general too crude to be pleasant.”
Dickens responded to Leech’s complaints on December 14, 1843, writing, “I do not doubt, in my own mind, that you unconsciously exaggerate the evil done by the colorers. You can’t think how much better they will look in a neat book, than you suppose. But I have sent a Strong Dispatch to C[hapman] and H[all], and will report to you when I hear from them. I quite agree with you, that it is a point of great importance.”
The book was published on December 19, 1843. And then Dickens dove into the Christmas season.
“At Christmas 1843 Dickens, for all his pressing problems, managed to maintain a high level of seasonal jollity. Macready was away acting in America, and Dickens and Forster appointed themselves chief entertainers at the children’s party given by Mrs. Macready on Boxing Day,” wrote Claire Tomalin.
Catherine Macready was the wife of the famed English actor William Charles Macready, who that season was away in the United States on tour.
Jane Carlyle later related on the occasion, “Dickens and Forster above all exerted themselves till the perspiration was pouring down and they seemed drunk with their efforts. Only think of the excellent D[ickens] playing the conjuror for a whole hour—the best conjuror I ever saw—(and I have paid money to see several)— and Forster acting as his servant. This part of the entertainment concluded with a plum pudding made out of raw flour, raw eggs—all the usual ingredients—boiled in a gentleman’s hat—and tumbled out reeking—all in one minute before the eyes of the astonished children and astonished grown people.” She also relayed how fun it was to watch the adults all swinging about, dancing, even the “gigantic Thackeray.”
After Macready’s event, Dickens convinced William Makepeace Thackeray and John Forster to come back to Devonshire Terrace where they ended the night with drinks all around.
In a letter to Prof. Cornelius Felton in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Dickens excitedly told of how he celebrated to all ends, writing, “Forster is out again; and if he don’t go in again, after the manner in which we have been keeping Christmas, he must be very strong indeed. Such dinings, such dancings, such conjurings, such blindman’sbluffings, such theater goings, such kissings-out of the old years and kissings-in of the new ones, never took place in these parts before. To keep the Chuzzlewit going, and this little book, the Carol, in the odd times between the parts of it, was, as you may suppose, pretty tight work. But when it was done I broke out like a mad man. And if you could have seen me at the Children’s party at the Macready’s the other night, going down a country dance with Mrs. M., you would have thought I was a country gentleman of independent property, residing on a tip top farm, with the wind blowing straight in my face the other day.”
“Good God, how we missed you,” Dickens wrote to William Charles Macready who was touring in America, “talked of you, drank to your health, and wondered what you were doing! Perhaps you . . . feel a little sore—just a little bit, you know, the merest trifle in the world—on hearing that Mrs. Macready looked brilliant, blooming, young, and handsome, and that she danced a country dance with the writer hereof. . . . Now you don’t like to be told that? Nor do you like to hear that Forster and I conjured bravely, that a plum pudding was produced from an empty saucepan, held over a blazing fire kindled in Stanfield’s hat without damage to the lining; that a box of brand was changed into a live guinea-pig, which ran between your godchild’s feet, and was the cause of such a shrill uproar and clapping of hands that you might have heard it (and I daresay did) in America. . . .”
* * *
Success!
The book was published December 19, 1843. The first printing of 6,000 copies sold out in the first week! A huge number by today’s standards, but even more impressive back then. Six more reprintings, in much smaller numbers, totaled to approximately 7,000 additional copies. The book was the success Dickens had hoped it would be.
“Never had little book an outset so full of brilliancy of promise. Published but a few days before Christmas, it was hailed on every side with enthusiastic greeting. The first edition of six thousand copies was sold the first day,” wrote Forster. “What was marked in him to the last was manifest now. He had identified himself with Christmas fancies. Its life and spirits, its humor in riotous abundance, of right belonged to him. Its imaginations as well as kindly thoughts were his; and its privilege to light up with some sort of comfort the squalidest places, he had made his own. Christmas Day was not more social or welcome: New Year’s Day not more new: Twelfth Night not more full of characters. The duty of diffusing enjoyment had never been taught by a more abundant, mirthful, thoughtful, ever-seasonable writer.”
Title page to the 1843 first edition of A Christmas Carol.
“The book went straight to the heart of the public and has remained lodged there ever since, with its mixture of horror, despair, hope and warmth, its message— a Christmas message—that even the worst of sinners may repent and become a good man; and its insistence that good cheer, food and drink shared, gifts and even dancing are not merely frivolous pleasures but basic expressions of love and mutual support among all human beings,” wrote Claire Tomalin.
Thomas Carlyle, the Scottish historian (whom Dickens greatly admired), went straight out and bought himself a turkey after reading A Christmas Caro
l and ate it.
Dickens’ literary rival and friend William Makepeace Thackeray exclaimed, “Who can listen to objections regarding such a book as this? It seems to me a national benefit, and to every man or woman who reads it a personal kindness.”
Fellow novelist Margaret Oliphant said that although it was “the apotheosis of turkey and plum pudding, [it] moved us all in those days as if it had been a new gospel.”
The most interesting comments on the book came from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s wife, Frances, who was enthusiastic about Carol. She and Longfellow read it together after midnight on January 27, 1844, and she presumably spoke for both when she called it “an admirable performance with a true Christmas glow about it, yet very pathetic and poetical besides.” A few days later, in a separate letter, she wrote, “Have you seen Dickens’ ‘Christmas Carol’? He sent it to Felton in its English garb, with capital woodcuts, and a nice clear type! It is a most admirable production I think, and has had great success in England, comforting people for the tediousness of Chuzzlewit. It is evidently written at heart and from the heart, and has a Christmas crackle and glow about it, besides much pathos and poetry of conception, which form a rich combination. The sketch of the poor clerk’s dinner is in his best manner, and almost consoles one for the poverty it reveals.”
Mrs. Longfellow’s opinion was a popular one. The public agreed. Whereas his long absence in America, and the disaster of Chuzzlewit, had dampened his reputation, A Christmas Carol immediately reestablished Dickens as one of the most popular and literate writers in the world. It absolutely saved his reputation.
“He was one of the oddest men to ever take up a pen. And yet this egregious figure, this uncommon man, held a position in the hearts and minds of his readers, especially the working man and woman, like no other. He seemed to be writing for them, on their behalf, voicing their hopes and beliefs, celebrating their lives. And in none of his works did he do this more than in A Christmas Carol, the book in which, if he didn’t actually invent it, he permanently transformed the meaning of Christmas,” wrote actor and scholar Simon Callow.
Peter Ackroyd made a bolder case, writing, “Christmas cards were not introduced until 1846, and Christmas crackers until the 1850s. Typically it was still a one-day holiday when presents were given to children, but there was no orgy of benevolence and generosity. It was a time of quiet rest. Acting. Reading aloud. Music. Games. What Dickens did was to transform the holiday by suffusing it with his own particular mixture of aspirations, memories, and fears.” But Ackroyd also went on to say, “Dickens had an acute sense of, a need for, ‘Home’—it sprang from his own experience of being banished from that blessed place—which is why in A Christmas Carol . . . there is a constant contrast between warmth and cold, between the rich and the poor, between the well and the ill, between the need for comfort and the anxiety of homelessness. “
“Dickens, with his A Christmas Carol, more than any other person helped to shape and invent the modern Christmas,” wrote Christmas historian Mark Connelly. “But surely one of the reasons for the success of Dickens was that people understood and related to the tale.”
* * *
Disappointment . . .
Within two weeks of the publication of A Christmas Carol, pirated editions were already on the stands. These “condensations” were little more than slight rewrites at best. Many had flat-out pirated the text. This was an ongoing situation for Dickens for most of his literary career, but soon after the book was published, he spent time and money fighting off these editions.
On January 6, 1844, Dickens instructed his lawyer Mitton, with whom he had shared that train ride so seemingly long ago, to institute chancery proceedings against Parley’s Penny Library. They had published A Christmas Ghost Story Reoriginated from the Original by Charles Dickens. Dickens soon found himself in a “world of injunctions, motions for dissolution, affidavits, vice-chancellors, and other intricate and costly legalities.”
Dickens was so obsessed and mortified he even attended one of the innumerable unauthorized dramatizations of his play being performed throughout London. “I saw the Carol last night,” he wrote to Forster of a dramatic performance at the Adelphi. “Better than usual, and Wright seems to enjoy Bob Cratchit, but heart-breaking to me. Oh Heaven! if any forecast of this was ever in my mind! Yet O. Smith was drearily better than I expected.”
But more bad news was on the doorstep. When the accountings for A Christmas Carol arrived, Dickens was horrified.
He had hoped to earn a £1,000 from the sale of the book, but the production costs—the tinted illustrations, the fancy endpapers, the gilding, etc.—had cut heavily into the profits.
“The first six thousand copies show a profit of 230 pounds!” he wrote to Forster. It was actually much less in retrospect.
Forster wrote in his biography of Dickens, “It may interest the reader, and be something of a curiosity of literature, if I give the expenses of the first edition of 6000, and of the 7000 more which constituted the five following editions, with the profit of the remaining 2000 which completed the sale of fifteen thousand.” The tables that follow are faithfully reproduced from Forster’s original writings.
CHRISTMAS CAROL.
1st Edition, 6000 No.
1843
Dec.
£
_s._
_d._
Printing
74
2
9
Paper
89
2
0
Drawings and Engravings
49
18
0
Two Steel Plates
1
4
0
Printing Plates
15
17
6
Paper for do
7
12
0
Colouring Plates
120
0
0
Binding
180
0
0
Incidents and Advertising
168
7
8
Commission
99
4
6
£805
8
5
2nd to the 7th Edition, making 7000 Copies.
1844.
Jan.
£
_s._
_d._
Printing
58
18
0
Paper
103
19
0
Printing Plates
17
10
0
Paper
8
17
4
Colouring Plates
140
0
0
Binding
199
18
2
Incidents and Advertising
83
5
8
Commission
107
18
10
£720
7
0
“Two thousand more, represented by the last item in the subjoined balance, were sold before the close of the year, leaving a remainder of seventy copies.”
1843
£
_s._
_d._
Dec. Balance of a/c to Mr. Dickens’s credit 1844
186
16
7
Jan. to April. Do. Do.
349
12
0
May to Dec. Do. Do.
189
11
5
Amount of Profit on the Work
£726
0
0
“But this is a chapter of disappointments,” Forster wrote. While Dickens had begrudgingly accepted Chuzzlewit’s lukewarm reception, which s
eemed “distant and problematical, so even the prodigious immediate success of the Christmas Carol itself was not to be an unmitigated pleasure.”
On January 10, 1844, Dickens wrote to Forster, “Such a night as I have passed! I really believed I should never get up again, until I had passed through all the horrors of a fever. I found the Carol accounts awaiting me, and they were the cause of it. The first six thousand copies show a profit of £230! And the last four will yield as much more. I had set my heart and soul upon a Thousand, clear. What a wonderful thing it is, that such a great success should occasion me such intolerable anxiety and disappointment!”
Dickens would go on to complain that Chapman and Hall had not properly advertised the book, and that they had layered in numerous charges to his accounting. Still, the sales of the book had been spectacular in such a short burst. Ironically, in December 1844, he would publish The Chimes, one of his several other Christmas writings, which sold fewer copies but netted him more than £1,500—much more than Carol.
“My year’s bills, unpaid, are so terrific,” Dickens wrote, “that all the energy and determination I can possibly exert will be required to clear me before I go abroad; which, if next June come and find me alive, I shall do. Good Heaven, if I had only taken heart a year ago! Do come soon, as I am very anxious to talk with you. We can send round to Mac after you arrive, and tell him to join us at Hampstead or elsewhere. I was so utterly knocked down last night, that I came up to the contemplation of all these things quite bold this morning. If I can let the house for this season, I will be off to some seaside place as soon as a tenant offers. I am not afraid, if I reduce my expenses; but if I do not, I shall be ruined past all mortal hope of redemption.”