Noble, selfish intentions both motivated ‘Christmas Carol’

After years of writing feverishly, Charles Dickens desperately needed a break from his demanding schedule and money to finance a year abroad.

England’s best-known author hoped “A Christmas Carol,” a tale about ghosts haunting the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge, would be his ticket to a yearlong Italian vacation for him, his wife, five children and servants.

“He lived very lavishly. He entertained very lavishly. ... Money was a concern,” said Michael Slater, a London-based scholar and author of a new Dickens biography, “Charles Dickens: A Life Defined by Writing.”

But Dickens also had a nobler motivation. During “the hungry 1840s,” rural people crowded into urban tenements and children worked under frightful conditions in factories and mines.

These reports struck a nerve because Dickens’ education was interrupted at age 11 when his father was thrown in debtors’ prison. He wound up working in a shoe-polish factory pasting labels on bottles.

“He felt so abandoned and desolate and betrayed and the future seemed so hopeless,” said Slater, emeritus professor of Victorian literature at Birkbeck College at the University of London. “He thought his life was lost forever.”

One night, after speaking in Manchester, a town known for its coal mines and factories, the now-famous author had an idea:

“He would write a story which would highlight concern for the poor man’s child. ... Tiny Tim stood for all poor children in Britain,” said Slater, author of six other books about the 18th-century British novelist.

Dickens insisted on hiring John Leech to draw the illustrations and a whole group of women to hand-color them, both major expenses.

Released just in time for Christmas 1843, “A Christmas Carol” was an enormous hit. But financially, it was a bitter disappointment.

The first 6,000 copies gave Dickens a profit of 230 pounds. In today’s dollars that figure would be $28,000, according to the Web site www.measuringworth.com.

Dickens’ classic tale has been republished many times since and made into movies, including the just-released Disney version.

Professor John O. Jordan, director of The Dickens Project at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said that Dickens contributed “to the modern idea of Christmas as a family celebration, moving it out of church and into the middle-class home.”

“Everyone responds powerfully to the idea, the possibility, that in midlife or late in life, one can still change and be a better person,” Jordan said.


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