A Christmas Carol wasn’t just a bestseller – it changed the way that Britons chose to mark the festive season
WORDS: NIGE TASSELL
Contrary to popular belief, Charles Dickens didn’t invent Christmas. However, by the time he sat down to write A Christmas Carol in 1843, the observing of the festive season in Britain was, at the very least, not the great festival celebrated in its medieval heyday. What the tremendous success of A Christmas Carol did – alongside Prince Albert gifting the young Queen Victoria a spruce fir for a Christmas tree three years earlier – was to both revive and reinvent the festivities in this country, returning it towards a level of popularity enjoyed across continental Europe, particularly in Albert’s native Germany.
CHANGING OPINIONS
In observing the unrelenting and often debilitating effects of the Industrial Revolution on the British workforce, Dickens understood the potential of Christmas to be a pressure valve for the population’s working lives, a punctuation mark around which the next 12 months might revolve. Through the effervescent Fred in A Christmas Carol, he described Christmas as “the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys”. At a turn, Dickens had redefined the spirit of Christmas. Any real-life dissenters reading the book would have their opinions on the festivities reversed thanks to the moral lessons of its three ghosts, much as Dickens’s pen would overturn the outlook of one of his most enduring creations, Fred’s uncle Ebenezer Scrooge. The critic GK Chesterton later wrote that “whether the Christmas visions would or would not convert Scrooge, they convert us”. The book’s message was irresistible. So persuasive were Dickens’s words and sentiment that the historian Thomas Carlyle hosted two Christmas dinners at his home. Similarly, Robert Louis Stevenson announced, once he’d turned the last page, that he would be donating some of his income to charities aiding the poor.
AN INSTANT CLASSIC A Christmas Carol was partly written out of economic necessity – Dickens’s latest novel Martin Chuzzlewit was selling badly, his finances faltering. But it was also a response
