‘A Christmas Carol’ Marvelously Captured the Holiday’s Victorian Spirit and Inspired New Traditions for Centuries to Come

In the preface to his novella A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens wrote that he “endeavor[ed] in this Ghostly little book to raise the Ghost of an Idea” for his readers. “May it haunt their houses pleasantly,” he wished.

For generations, Dickens’ most iconic characters and images have indeed revisited readers each holiday season, just as the curmudgeonly Ebenezer Scrooge is haunted by the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come in the book.

But modern readers might not realize the extent to which their other associations with Christmas, from turkeys to charitable giving, were solidified by Dickens’ novella, which was published on this day in 1843.

The mid-19th century found Great Britain in the midst of an identity crisis. The Industrial Revolution was reshaping the nation’s urban spaces, economic hierarchies and society. The “palpable brown air” and beggars on the narrow, grimy streets that Dickens describes in the book’s opening pages were only the most material consequences of industrialization in London.

By the end of the tale, the erstwhile “dismal” and “morose” Scrooge, as his nephew describes him at the beginning of the book, is so transformed that “some people laughed to see the alteration in him.” But Scrooge lets them laugh as he cheerily drops off a Christmas turkey for Tiny Tim’s impoverished family. “His own heart laughed,” Dickens wrote, “and that was quite enough for him.”

Scrooge’s transformation is not just a personal one, however. Dickens baked his social gospel deep into the tale. If Scrooge’s attitude that the destitute should die to decrease the “surplus population” reflected a common view of the day, his “penitence and grief” at hearing his words repeated back to him later in the story should apply just as widely, Dickens implied.

In Callow’s words, Dickens made “Christmas the point of intersection of the whole life of society, where a huge effort of benevolence, of generosity and of integration could be harnessed to heal the running wound at the heart of the world in which he lived.”

Victorian society clearly had an appetite for Dickens’ warm-hearted wisdom. A Christmas Carol was a smashing success, selling out its first run of 6,000 copies by Christmas Eve. It has never gone out of print since.

Community and tradition were also under threat, driven apart by stark economic inequality. When Scrooge’s nephew blows in from the cold with a cheerful “Merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!” the miserly moneylender responds with his catchphrase, “Bah! Humbug!”

“It was a nervous time,” wrote literary scholar John Sutherland, and this Scrooge-like hostility to celebration and cheer was not uncommon.

Dickens himself was in a financial rough patch in the fall of 1843, having overspent on a tour of America the previous year. He was also acutely affected by a parliamentary report from 1842 that detailed the plight of working-class children in British factories and mines.

As Christmas reached “unprecedented popularity” in Britain, inspired by the adoption of German holiday traditions like the Tannenbaum tree popularized by German-born Prince Albert, Dickens realized that a story about cheer and charity might address both his financial problems and his moral misgivings about Victorian society, wrote Simon Callow in Dickens’ Christmas: A Victorian Celebration.

Starting in October 1843, Dickens wrote the tale in just six weeks, spending the days writing and the nights wandering London’s dark streets, gathering material and sentiment for his big-hearted novella.

“A Christmas Carol is, above all else, about change and the possibility of change,” Callow explained. Dickens understood that Victorian society wanted to feel better, recapture the familiar feelings of a bygone age and recenter the joys of domestic life even as industrialization strained families. Dreary conditions didn’t have to last forever.

Eli Wizevich | | READ MORE

Eli Wizevich is a history correspondent for Smithsonian. He studied history at the University of Chicago and previously wrote for the El Paso Times.