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| A Christmas Carol |
Yesterday, The Grandma went to the library to read about Steve Biko. Today, she has returned to borrow A Christmas Carol, one of the most popular novels of the universal literature written by Charles Dickens.
A Christmas Carol was first published on a day like today in 1843 and The Grandma has wanted to homage this event reading this wonderful novel again.
Before going to the library, The Grandma has read a new chapter of Michael Dean's A Ghost in Love and Other Plays.
More information: Too Much, Too Many, Enough I & II
A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas, commonly known as A Christmas Carol, is a novella by Charles Dickens, first published in London by Chapman & Hall in 1843 and illustrated by John Leech.
A Christmas Carol recounts the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, an elderly miser who is visited by the ghost of his former business partner Jacob Marley and the spirits of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come. After their visits, Scrooge is transformed into a kinder, gentler man.
Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol during a period when the British were exploring and re-evaluating past Christmas traditions, including carols and newer customs such as Christmas trees. He was influenced by the experiences of his own youth and by the Christmas stories of other authors including Washington Irving and Douglas Jerrold.
Dickens had
written three Christmas stories prior to the novella, and was inspired
following a visit to the Field Lane Ragged School, one of several
establishments for London's street children. The treatment of the poor
and the ability of a selfish man to redeem himself by transforming into a
more sympathetic character are the key themes of the story. There is
discussion among academics as to whether this was a fully secular story,
or if it is a Christian allegory.
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| A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens |
Published on 19 December, the first edition sold out by Christmas Eve; by the end of 1844 thirteen editions had been released. Most critics reviewed the novella favourably. The story was illicitly copied in January 1844; Dickens took legal action against the publishers, who went bankrupt, further reducing Dickens's small profits from the publication. He went on to write four other Christmas stories in subsequent years.
In 1849 he began public readings of the story which proved so successful he undertook 127 further performances until 1870, the year of his death. A Christmas Carol has never been out of print and has been translated into several languages; the story has been adapted many times for film, stage, opera and other media.
A Christmas Carol
captured the zeitgeist of the mid-Victorian revival of the Christmas
holiday. Dickens had acknowledged the influence of the modern Western
observance of Christmas and later inspired several aspects of Christmas,
including family gatherings, seasonal food and drink, dancing, games
and a festive generosity of spirit.
The writer Charles Dickens
was born to a middle class family which got into financial difficulties
as a result of the spendthrift nature of his father John. In 1824 John
was committed to the Marshalsea, a debtors' prison in Southwark, London.
Dickens, aged 12, was forced to pawn his collection of books,
leave school and work at a dirty and rat-infested shoe-blacking factory.
The change in circumstances gave him what his biographer, Michael
Slater, describes as a deep personal and social outrage, which heavily influenced his writing and outlook.
By the end of 1842 Dickens was a well-established author, having written six major works, as well as several short stories, novellas and other pieces. At the end of December of that year he began publishing his novel Martin Chuzzlewit as a monthly serial; the novel was his favourite work, but sales were disappointing and he faced temporary financial difficulties.
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| Charles Dickens |
Celebrating the Christmas season had been growing in popularity through the Victorian era. The Christmas tree had been introduced in Britain during the 18th century, and its use was popularised by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Their practice was copied in many homes across the country.
In the early 19th century there had been a revival of interest in Christmas carols, following a decline in popularity over the previous hundred years. The publication of Davies Gilbert's 1823 work Some Ancient Christmas Carols, With the Tunes to Which They Were Formerly Sung in the West of England and William Sandys's 1833 collection Christmas Carols, Ancient and Modern led to a growth in the form's popularity in Britain.
Dickens had an interest in Christmas, and his first story on the subject was Christmas Festivities, published in Bell's Weekly Messenger in 1835; the story was then published as A Christmas Dinner in Sketches by Boz (1836). The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton, another Christmas story, appeared in the 1836 novel The Pickwick Papers.
In the episode, a Mr Wardle relates the tale of Gabriel Grub, a lonely and mean-spirited sexton, who undergoes a Christmas conversion after being visited by goblins who show him the past and future. Slater considers that the main elements of the Carol are present in the story, but not yet in a firm form. The story is followed by a passage about Christmas in Dickens's editorial Master Humphrey's Clock. The professor of English literature Paul Davis writes that although the Goblins story appears to be a prototype of A Christmas Carol, all Dickens's earlier writings about Christmas influenced the story.
More information: BBC
The phrase Merry Christmas had been around for many years -the earliest known written use was in a letter in 1534- but Dickens's use of the phrase in A Christmas Carol popularised it among the Victorian public. The exclamation Bah! Humbug! entered popular use in the English language as a retort to anything sentimental or overly festive; the name Scrooge became used as a designation for a miser, and was added to the Oxford English Dictionary as such in 1982.
In the early 19th century the celebration of Christmas was associated in Britain with the countryside and peasant revels, disconnected to the increasing urbanisation and industrialisation taking place.
In A Christmas Carol, Dickens showed that Christmas could be celebrated in towns and cities, despite increasing modernisation. The modern observance of Christmas is largely the result of a mid-Victorian revival of the holiday. The Oxford Movement of the 1830s and 1840s had produced a resurgence of the traditional rituals and religious observances associated with Christmastide and, with A Christmas Carol, Dickens captured the zeitgeist while he reflected and reinforced his vision of Christmas.
More information: The Guardian
Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions
of our childhood days, recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth,
and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and quiet home!
Charles Dickens
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