The Man Who Invented Christmas

The Man Who Invented Christmas: How Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits
by Les Standiford

Don’t blame Charles Dickens for Christmas shopping.

But otherwise, Les Standiford argues in his book, the famed British chronicler of working-class woes deserves credit for creating the modern notion of the holiday. The long-lasting popularity of his A Christmas Carol cemented customs like decorated trees, dinnertime turkeys, mistletoe and generosity of spirit. (Wrapped presents appear nowhere in the tale, Standiford is quick to note.)

A good chunk of this red-and-green little book (with a gift tag printed on its first page for your seasonal needs) is devoted to the story behind the story. Dickens, as his biographers have reported, had a rough childhood, working in dismal factories of the sort he would later write to great literary effect, while his family languished in a debtors’ prison. As Standiford says in his easygoing prose, they had no real vices, “they simply were and always had been the sort of people who earned seven pounds a week and spent eight.” Dickens nonetheless managed to bootstrap himself to quite a high artistic perch, possessing a popularity that Standiford said would be hard to imagine today, a cross between celebrity and pundit, journalist and poet. And before Dickens invented Christmas, he reinvented the publishing industry by moving so many copies of his stories: “In many ways, [Dickens] would influence publishing as profoundly as the steam engine or the blast furnace would redirect manufacturing.”

But A Christmas Carol came at a low point for Dickens, when his spirits and sales were down after three successive flops, when he told a friend he was “so irritated…so rubbed in the tenderest part of my eyelids with bay-salt, that I don’t think I can write.” (Emphasis Dickens.) But inspiration came after Dickens delivered a momentous speech alongside Benjamin Disraeli in Manchester (“the chimney of the world”). After the crowd heartily received his speech encouraging learning and education, he felt moved to write an instructive, uplifting Christmas story.

His publishers, however, were none too thrilled by the concept of a holiday book – this was before the era, Standiford tells us, of the annual flurry of yuletide-themed popular entertainments. That left Dickens to manage the design of the book himself while promising the publisher a small cut of the profits (they ended up taking a good 80%).

The story, written in six weeks and totaling a breezy 30,000 words, was a big hit, prompting Dickens to write a string of Christmas follow-ups (none are well remembered today). It also came at a time when Christmas was already gaining popularity, transforming from an austere occasion to something more fun, which suggests, as Standiford does admit, that Dickens didn’t come up Christmas all by his lonesome.

Still, A Christmas Carol and its inimitable characters – the miser, the diseased boy (Standiford suspects the unnamed ailment was rickets) – stuck so firmly in British and American minds that it became synonymous with the season. A year doesn’t go by without a staging, and at least 28 film versions have been made, Standiford writes. Dickens himself gave public readings of the story to thousands of attendees, who routinely weeped at Tiny Tim’s concluding blessing, every year until he died.

Excerpt: “Considered against the backdrop of an era when the British Empire expanded to its zenith and when advancement in science and industry suggested that Western man was truly the master of his own fate, the themes of A Christmas Carol, the real reasons for its vast appeal and influence, seem evident: with the support of a tight-knit family, with education and charity and the expenditure of goodwill from one to all – with time out for celebration not neglected – such problems as Ignorance and Want could be banished from the world.”

Further Reading: A Christmas Carol


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