God bless us every one!
THE MAN WHO INVENTED CHRISTMAS:
How Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career
& Revived Our Holiday Spirits
By Les Standiford
256 pp. Crown Publishing Group $19.95
Reviewed by Ruth Douillette
The countdown has begun. Only blah, blah, blah shopping days till Christmas. Bah! Humbug!
I hate shopping, and some of that angst rubs off on this rapidly approaching holiday. I’m not a Scrooge, but if a ghost from Christmas present cares to make a nighttime visit, I’ll have a thing or two to tell him, along with a few requests for the ghost of Christmas future, too.
You recognize, of course, the references to Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. “Bah! Humbug!” and “Scrooge” are as familiar as the turkey on the holiday table.
Despite being penned over 150 years ago, A Christmas Carol has maintained its popularity both in print and on stage, and continues to enthrall audiences in full-screen cinematic glory undreamed of in nineteenth-century England. To say Dickens “invented Christmas” might be a stretch, but Carol certainly influenced its celebration.
How did this tale that continues to inspire millions come to be? Les Standiford tells us in The Man Who Invented Christmas, taking us beyond standard classroom English Lit discussions, providing the little-known circumstances under which Dickens’s “slender volume” was written.
Dickens published more than 20 novels before his death in 1870, none of which has gone out of print, according to Standiford. But the “exquisitely crafted” Carol is considered “his most perfect work.” With fewer than 30,000 words, it was second only to The Bible in readership at the end of the 19th century.
Dickens, whose name has become an adjective for poor social and economic conditions, spent some Dickensian moments himself. Beginning at age 12, he worked at a bootblack warehouse for six shillings a week to support his family during the years his father, unable, or unwilling, to curtail spending, landed himself and his family in debtor’s prison—except for Charles, who continued to toil on his family’s behalf.
By his late teens he’d made a name for himself in the literary world, much of his work written in installments, sold in magazine format, then bound and sold again as a novel upon completion of the tale. Dickens was attracting 100,000 readers to issues of The Old Curiosity Shop. With a potential middle class readership of 300,000 to 500,000, Standiford says:
Dickens was . . . selling his work to somewhere between one-fifth and one-quarter of the literate public of a nation. Compare those figures with modern-day America, where 200 million or so working, literate adults constitute the potential ’book-buying public,’ and where a sale of 75,000 to 100,000 copies— one-twentieth of one percent— is often enough to put an author high up on the list of New York Times bestsellers.
Standiford explains the events that toppled Dickens from the “heights of literary Olympus” to “banishment to the foothills.” Diminishing sales and interest, and fewer gestures of public approval, lowered Dickens’s sense of self-worth. Liberal quotes from Dickens’s correspondence to friends and publishers serve as a clear barometer of his mood. We glimpse Dickens, the man, different from the view we may have formed after reading his stories.
By the time A Christmas Carol poured from his hurried and harried pen in the six short weeks before Christmas in 1843, Dickens was 31, married with five children—an established and respected writer for whom things had taken a downward dive, leaving him deeply in debt. The tale that roiled through his head during an agitated walk one evening would be just the thing to spark sales and get him out of the red, he hoped.
The Man Who Invented Christmas is a captivating story of a great writer at a low point in his life whose “most perfect work” was turned down by his long-term publisher, to whom he owed money. An author who believed so strongly in his story that he determined to publish it anyway, Dickens managed the entire process himself, called self-publication today. The book sold out within days, to everyone’s surprise except Dickens’s, but it didn’t get him out of debt.
Dickens planned to write a Christmas book each year after Carol, and made it happen for five years, each tale proclaiming Dickens’s overarching social themes, but none ever crawled so deeply into the hearts of readers as did the inspirational A Christmas Carol.
In early 1844 Dickens wrote that he “felt certain he could surpass what he had achieved with A Christmas Carol.” After a cold bath and breakfast he would “blaze away, wrathful and red-hot,” he wrote, “until three o’clock or so.”
Upon completing The Chimes he told a friend he had “a real good cry.” “I believe I have written a tremendous Book; and knocked Carol out of the field. It will make a great uproar, I have no doubt.” The tremendous response didn’t ensure a legacy like Carol, however.
In Standiford’s informative book, readers get a lot more than the backstory of Carol, however, including a clear look at the publishing industry of the day, the social clime, and intimate details of Dickens’ correspondence. Watching him wrestle with “the demons of his childhood,” perhaps putting them to rest in his self-proclaimed “favorite child,” David Copperfield, and explaining the deep link between his background and fierce social beliefs he espoused throughout all his writing provides a hook on which to hang the timeless Carol.
Details such as these, well-organized and dispensed in conversational style, make Standiford’s book worth a read before you curl up with A Christmas Carol or see the play this season.
Read and enjoy. No “Bah! Humbug!” here.
Ruth Douillette retired after 35 years as a middle school teacher, and now freelances as a writer and photographer.
Her essays have been published in the Christian Science Monitor, Cup of Comfort, Chicken Soup for the Soul, and
Under Our Skin, an anthology about breast cancer. Her photography has been featured in flashquake's gallery of art. Ruth
is a member of the Internet Writing Workshop where she’s an administrator for the Practice group. For a sample of her writing
and photography, visit Upstream and Down~.
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