A Christmas Carol
by Charles Dickens
Summary
Ebenezer Scrooge is a London businessman who keeps his clerk Bob Cratchit half frozen at his desk, refuses his nephew's invitation to Christmas dinner, and turns away charity collectors with the suggestion that the poor who would rather die than go to the workhouse had better get on with it. On Christmas Eve the ghost of his dead business partner Jacob Marley, dragging a chain forged of his own greed, warns Scrooge that three spirits will visit him that night. The Ghost of Christmas Past shows him the boy he was and the choices that hardened him; the Ghost of Christmas Present takes him into the Cratchit household, where the crippled Tiny Tim may not live to see another year on Scrooge's wages, and into his nephew's warm, mocking, affectionate Christmas party; the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shows him his own unmourned death and the strangers picking over his belongings. Scrooge wakes transformed, sends a prize turkey to the Cratchits, raises Bob's wages, and becomes, the narrator tells us, as good a friend and master as the good old city knew.
The book moves fast, a novella of five short staves rather than chapters, and its speed is part of its power: there is no room for the sentiment to curdle. Dickens wrote it in about six weeks under financial pressure, reportedly walking fifteen to twenty miles through London at night while composing it, and the urgency shows in a story with almost no wasted motion.
It is worth reading past the familiarity of the plot, since so much of it survives only as adaptation shorthand; the original prose is sharper and funnier, and Scrooge's redemption harder won, than most screen versions let on.
Historical Context & Significance
Published on 19 December 1843 by Chapman and Hall, the first printing of six thousand copies sold out by Christmas Eve, and thirteen editions had appeared by the end of the following year. Thackeray called it a national benefit and, to every man or woman who reads it, a personal kindness, and The Athenaeum praised a tale to make the reader laugh and cry in the same breath; reviews were almost uniformly warm. An unauthorised condensed version appeared within weeks, and Dickens sued and won, though the legal costs of nearly seven hundred pounds outstripped the damages.
Its influence on how English speakers picture Christmas itself is hard to overstate: the book is widely credited with reviving and popularising customs of family gatherings, seasonal generosity and the phrase Merry Christmas, and the word Scrooge entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 1982 as shorthand for a miser. Dickens performed the story aloud more than a hundred times between 1849 and 1870, and it has never been out of adaptation since, on stage, in eight productions within two months of publication alone, and later on film, radio and television.