"It is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child himself." --A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens.
A Christmas Carol was published on December 17, 1843, and it sold over 5,000 copies by Christmas Eve. The book "was attractively produced as a Christmas gift book, price five shillings, with salmon-brown covers, gilt lettering, coloured end-papers, gilt edges and wonderful illustrationsby Dickens's friend the Punch artist John Leech. Four of these were dropped into the text and four were hand-coloured full-plate insets." It has never been out of print. I have decided I need to read a proper Christmas book, and having never read any Dickens at all, this seems the obvious choice.
I generally skip reading introductions, but I have found the introduction to my edition, written by Michael Slater very informative (above description of the initial edition is quoted from the intro). A Christmas Carol defined the idea of the Anglo-American Christmas. At the time of publication the traditional Christmas celebration was in decline. Dickens was very influenced by American writer Washington Irving and his book, The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. Apparently the influence can be seen in The Pickwick Papers, of which a section is the precursor to A Christmas Carol. Pickwick was published in 1836-7, and it wasn't until 1843 that Dickens published A Christmas Carol. Although I have not read any Dickens, I know he was into social reform.
"Speaking at the first annual soiree of the Manchester Athenaeum, an institution which sought to bring culture and 'blameless rational enjoyment' to the working classes, Dickens dwelt on the terrible sights he had seen among the juvenile population in London's jails and doss-houses and stressed the desperate need for educating the poor. This occasion seems to have put into his mind the idea for a story, building on, but also utterly transforming, the old Pickwick Christmas Eve tale of Gabriel Grub, which should help to open the the hearts of of the prosperous and powerful towards the poor and powerless but which should also bring centrally into play the theme of memory that, as we have seen, was always so strongly associated with Christmas for him."
A Christmas Carol was born. He actually wrote many Christmas books thereafter--both small books and special Christmas issues of his weekly journals. They tend to have the theme of "home and family love" and use the supernatural as well. I guess there must be something to the idea of telling stories by the fireside which necessitates the use of ghosts! Christmas is not complete without a ghost story? This is my ghost story this year. I had thought I would only read A Christmas Carol, which is fairly short (less than 100 pages), but now that I see how many other Christmas tales he wrote, I may have to read all the stories in my edition (eight). You can read along with me here (I love eTexts). Perhaps some readers from the UK have visited the Charles Dickens Museum in London? This is the only house of Dickens which still stands. There is also an extensive list of film, TV, and theatrical adaptations here. I'm off to read my first proper Dickens (and definitely not my last).