Dickens, Debt and A Christmas Carol.

Dickens was in debt!

         Sales of his latest serialization, Martin Chuzzlewit, were not doing well. His previous two books, Barnaby Rudge and American Notes, had also failed to engage readers in the same way as Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby or The Old Curiosity Shop had previously done. To add the Charles’ problems his wife Catherine was pregnant with their fifth child, and he already owed £240 to his solicitor and old school friend Thomas Mitton. And further complicating matters, his publisher Chapman & Hall, due to the poor sales of Chuzzelwit, were looking to reduce his weekly income by £50. They, as did many others, believed that the poor sales of his more recent works was evidence of Dickens’ waning popularity. So Charles needed to raise some cash – fast!  His answer was to pen what would become one of his most enduring and best-loved of books.

      The spectre of debt was never far from Dickens’ mind. In February 1824 his father had been incarcerated at the Marshalsea Debtors Prison, forcing a twelve-year-old Charles to leave school and work ten-hour days at Warren’s Blacking Factory, earning about seven shillings a week. “My whole nature was so penetrated with the grief and humiliation of such considerations,’ he later wrote, “that I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children; even that I am a man; and wander desolately back to that time of my life.” His father was in part responsible for his current financial strife. John Dickens thought nothing of using his famous son’s name to acquire loans he could never hope to repay. Dickens’ friends and even his publisher were approached for money, which always resulted in Charles having to bail his father out. So with himself now facing financial ruin it’s not surprising that Dickens was sent scrambling for his writing materials. 

      Charles started work on his “little Christmas book” in mid-October 1843. Much of its composition was done during evening walks, where he would at times burst out with laughter or sob with anguish at the comical antics or painful suffering of his characters. Fortunately these nocturnal excursions were carried out when most “sober people were tucked up in their beds”.

      Normally, because of their length and innumerable characters, Dickens would write plot summaries for each novel, but with Carol there was simply no time. Instead he turned to a minor character from The Pickwick Papers. Gabriel Grub – a precursor to Ebenezer Scrooge – was a misanthropic sexton and gravedigger, who featured in one of a number of digressive ghost stories, told by Pickwick and his friends. Grub is digging a grave on Christmas Eve when he is abducted by goblins, and tortured with visions of the past and future. The “cross-grained surly” sexton is forced to relinquish his anti-social ways and reintegrate into the community “full of mirth and cheerfulness”. With this basic plot in mind, Dickens added more pressure upon himself by adding a yuletide theme. He was quite use to working to tight deadlines, and his original manuscript – now housed at the Morgan Library, New York – shows the method of the story’s composition, allowing us to see the author at work. The pace and editing is feverish, rapid and boldly confident. Deleted text is struck out with a cursive and continuous looping of the pen and replace with a more concise but no less effective replacement. On the opening page a long tangent about the role of the ghost in Hamlet is boxed off and scored through.

      A month later the 31-year-old author, now suffering from a cold, but still in full flow, wrote to a friend: “I have been working from morning until night upon my little Christmas book and have really had no time to think of anything but that.” Six frantic weeks later his “little Christmas book” was ready for the printers, and on the 19^th December 1843 A Christmas Carol hit the bookshops. All 6,000 copies were sold by Christmas Eve, and a further 2,000 snapped up by January 6^th. Literary reviews were generally favourable, with the author being particularly pleased with the review in The Morning Chronicle. “The Carol is a prodigious success”, Charles announced proudly to his son Fred in a letter dated 30^th December. 

      In many ways Carol was a potboiler – a get-rich-quick scheme. But Charles also saw it as an opportunity to put across the plight of the poor, by stating that charitable goodwill should start with the individual. In stave one Scrooge’s nephew, Fred, sums this up nicely when he tells his grouchy uncle that Christmas is a time when people “open up their shut-up hearts” and view those less fortunate as “fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another races of creatures bound on other journeys.” Carol became a morality tale after a recent visit to the Field Lane Ragged School, where Charles saw the plight of dozens of real life “Tiny Tim’s”. He, like much of Victorian Britain, had been outraged by the findings of a report commissioned by the Children’s Employment Commission, which revealed that many young people laboured in wretched conditions. When, in stave three, the ghost of Christmas Present reveals to Scrooge the waif children, Ignorance and Want, the accompanying illustration shows the smoking industrial chimneys of Manchester in the background.

But Dickens also drew on his own personal memories. Bob Cratchit’s home and his run to work are drawn from the streets and dwellings of Camden Town. Tiny Tim (originally to be called Tiny Fred) was based on his own crippled nephew, whom he had last see back in September. Sadly the boy died a few weeks after the book’s publication.

      The moral message of Carol was that healthy societies, like sound families, are based on mutual responsibilities and responsiveness, and not selfishness and capitalists greed, which is as true today as in was in Dickens’ time. This, as with Shakespeare’s plays, which expose all the strengths and frailties of the human condition, is part of the book’s continued longevity.

      Charles personally oversaw every stage of the book’s production. He commissioned John Leech – himself no stranger to financial hardship – to produce four coloured etchings and four woodcuts within the text. The book was bound in red leather, with a gilt design on the cover, and the page edges were also gilt; altogether a hansom volume, and at the relatively low price of five shillings. The public were so enthused it not only dispelled the commercial failure of Martin Chuzzelwit, it also dispelled any fears Charles may have had concerning his waning popularity. William Makepeace Thackery called it “a national benefit”. But despite its commercial success, Dickens would later grumble about how it was “an intolerable anxiety and disappointment” financially. He had hoped to make £1,000 profit. “The first six thousand copies show a profit of £230!” he wrote to a friend. In fact it was more like £137. Much of the book’s profits were absorbed by productions costs: the expensive binding, the high quality paper and Leech’s colour illustrations, and advertising. By the time Charles wrote his second Christmas story, The Chimes, in 1844, Carol had netted him just £726. With such a commercial let down he was forced to yet again go cap in hat to his old friend Thomas Mitton. But Carol’s mixed blessings were to take on a legal twist.

      Within weeks of the original going on sale a number of pirate editions appeared, often with new characters or scenes and sold at a fraction of the price of the original. Charles immediately applied for a court injunction against these plagiarising “rogues and impostors”. However, it was a bitter victory for most of the defendants declared themselves bankrupt, resulting in Charles having to pay his own legal costs. In America, where copyright laws were non-existent, editions of the book were circulated without the author’s name attached, which meant no royalties. Dickens unfairly blamed the book’s publisher, Chapman and Hall, for his meagre return and severed all connection with them.

      The popularity of the book continues to this day. Not once in its 174 year history has it been out of print, and it has been numerously adapted for stage and screen. However, it is misconception to say that Dickens invented Christmas – or at least how we celebrate it today. When Charles first put pen to paper that afternoon in mid-October, Christmas was already going through something of a revolution.

   During the early part of the nineteenth century the festival was hardly celebrated among the industrial working class, and was generally believed to be on the decline. Workers – the real Bob Cratchit’s – were lucky if they got Christmas Day off! But social and economic changes began to sweep the country, a religious revival with greater emphasis on traditional virtues: neighbourliness, charity, and goodwill. In Carol Dickens seized upon the prevailing mood, crystallising it into popular form, making it accessible to the reading public. It is true to say that A Christmas Carol did play its part in the evolution of how we celebrate Christmas, but it’s just one of a series of events. Shortly after its publication Charles moved his family to a large house in Genoa, Italy, to reduce living costs.

   His next Christmas book, The Chimes, also dealt with supernatural visitations, and was his first to be written outside Britain. He hoped it would supersede A Christmas Carol, knocking it “out of its field”. Despite mixed reviews the book was a success, resulting in him acquiring his £1,000, enabling to settle his debts. However, despite his disillusionment it is A Christmas Carol that would become the public’s favourite.

      Today in our world of food banks, zero hours contracts, and news stories of people being forced to choose between food on the table and heating their home because of extortionate fuel bills, Carol’s moral message is as relevant now as in Dickens’ time. It reminds us to honour this period and “try to keep it all the year”. That Christmas should be a time of cheer and charity, of kindness, forgiveness and redemption; a time when we should not view those less fortunate with mockery or distain. In writing A Christmas Carol Charles Dickens gave the world a gift, not only of years past, but for now and years to come!

© copyright Martin Charlton

All images: public domain