On this day 180 years ago Charles Dickens gave his first public reading of A Christmas Carol. Just two days after Christmas, around 2,000 people gave the author their rapt attention, not to mention frequent applause.
Published on 19 December 1843, it had already sold 5,000 copies by Christmas Eve. It has never been out of print since and is credited with reviving the Christian holiday of Christmas in the Anglo world.
An anecdote from a Dickens biography tells the story of a London barrow-girl who was overheard exclaiming on 9 June 1870 after hearing of the death of the author: “Dickens dead?! Then will Father Christmas die too?”
Such was the influence of Dickens on the traditional of Christmas.
A Christmas Carol isn’t just a story about a miser becoming redeemed and a little boy who cannot walk and doesn’t die. It is fundamentally a Christian story. Its publication coincided with the “hungry forties” of the 19th century when poverty and child labour were rampant.
As the introduction to the story in the Penguins Classic version explains: “The very survival of poor families outside of the workhouse was a precarious matter.”
Dickens’s self-appointed “Critic Laureate”, Lord Jeffrey, was moved to write to Dickens: “Blessings on your kind heart…you may be sure you have done more good by this little publication, fostered more kindly feelings, and prompted more positive acts of beneficence than can be traced to all the pulpits and confessionals in Christendom since Christmas 1842.”
A Christmas Carol promotes Christian charity and its related acts: feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, visiting prisoners, sheltering strangers, visiting the sick, and burying the dead.
It reportedly proved so inspirational to struggling families who read it that some wrote to Dickens to tell him that “amid many confidences about their homes, how the Carol had come to be read aloud there, and was to be kept upon a little shelf by itself and was to do them no end of good”.
In addition to trying to carry out acts of Christian charity, as opposed to being sucked in by today’s relentless consumerism, you should try to actually read or at least watch a version of A Christmas Carol over the festive season.
I read a version to my oldest son last year and am reading it for him again this year. It is very close to Dickens’ original, which in itself is a natural fit for both children and adults. For it is indeed a “little publication”. If you have previously found Dickens novels too long or intimidating, you will get through this short one far more easily.
Also, A Christmas Carol is a page turner! You want to keep reading it even though you know what happens, which is one of the reasons it makes for such riveting viewing also. I brought my three eldest children to our local cinema last year for the screening of a theatrical production of the story – like being at the theatre but (and somewhat in keeping with the spirit of A Christmas Carol) less expensive – and it was very moving.
Above all A Christmas Carol is a ghost story that probes the netherworld of our imaginations. Dickens’s description of a gloomy and dark London are eerie. It was intended to make you ask yourself, just how will your acts – or lack of them – of charity be examined when your day of judgement comes?
It is also of course hugely hopeful. The scenes of domestic love and togetherness at the Cratchit Christmas table are particularly tender. But A Christmas Carol is not about having the “perfect Christmas”, a pressure we can all relate to; whether you are a mother slaving away for a family and juggling demands of children and in-laws, or a singleton feeling inadequate about having a Christmas that doesn’t match the adverts or movies.
A Christmas Carol is there to remind us about the true meaning of Christmas, which it ingeniously manages to do without mentioning the coming of Christ. Presumably people back then didn’t need to be reminded as much as we do.
“The lost nothing, misinterpreted nothing, followed everything closely, laughed and cried,” Dickens said about that first public reading.
Photo: English novelist and magazine columnist Monica Dickens (1915 – 1992), reading to her children from ‘A Christmas Carol’ by her grandfather Charles Dickens, circa 1954. (Photo by Orlando /Three Lions/Getty Images.)
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