Certainly, Standiford points out, “There were no Christmas cards in 1843 England, no Christmas trees. George’s Day does today.”įor many Christians of the period, Christmas had uncomfortably pagan associations and they preferred to keep it low-key. “If Dickens did not invent Christmas,” he writes, “he certainly reinvented it.”īefore “A Christmas Carol,” Standiford explains, Christmas was “a relatively minor affair that ranked far below Easter, causing little more stir than Memorial Day or St. The book, which, at the turn of the 20th century was thought to have more readers than any book other than the Bible, is still one of the best known works in the English language.īut even beyond that, argues Standiford, who is an author and director of the Creative Writing Program at Florida International University, “A Christmas Carol” profoundly changed the way we celebrate the Christmas holiday. The story of the churlish Ebenezer Scrooge, the endearing family of his impoverished clerk Bob Cratchit, and Scrooge’s moral transformation after visits from a series of ghosts, did more than restore Dickens’s reputation. So, as Standiford recounts in The Man Who Invented Christmas: How Charles Dickens’s ‘A Christmas Carol’ Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits, in just six weeks Dickens sat down and wrote a classic of Western literature. Such a sum, he reckoned, might extricate him from debt. If he could quickly turn that story into a book – a Christmas story in time for the season – perhaps he could earn £1,000. But as he walked, an idea for a story suddenly came to him.
What happened next seems a kind of Victorian-era Christmas miracle.Īfter making his speech, Dickens wandered disconsolately through the dark streets of Manchester. The fabled author was even asking himself if he should give up fiction writing. “is marriage was troubled, his career tottering, his finances ready to collapse,” writes Les Standiford.
As a boy he watched his father go to jail for unpaid bills, a searing experience of which he would write, “I never afterwards forgot, I shall never forget, I never can forget.”īy 1843, Dickens was mired in woes. He produced a couple of duds – and then slipped into debt.ĭebt was a particularly horrifying prospect for Dickens. After a string of successful books, the great writer suddenly seemed to lose his way. Even though he was the superstar author of the wildly popular “The Pickwick Papers” and “The Adventures of Oliver Twist” – and that evening’s keynote speaker at an important charitable event – inside the man was in turmoil.Īs young celebrities often do, Dickens (the father of five) had overspent. 5, 1843, things were looking bleak for 31-year-old Charles Dickens.
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