A Christmas Carol

A rich man who has refused every request for help in his life is visited by three spirits in one night, and by morning he has changed. That is the whole plot of A Christmas Carol, and Charles Dickens wrote it in about six weeks in the autumn of 1843, when he was thirty-one and short of money himself.

Dickens knew from his own childhood what the Cratchits live through. When he was twelve, he was sent to work ten-hour days in a London factory, pasting labels onto pots of boot polish, and within days his father was imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea prison. In 1843 he read a government report on children working in mines and factories, and he wrote A Christmas Carol soon afterwards. He paid for the book’s printing himself, gave it a red cloth cover and four hand-coloured etchings by the artist John Leech, and set the price at five shillings.

A reader in 1843 knew the places in the story. Cornhill, where Bob Cratchit goes down a slide on Christmas Eve, was the street of banks and merchants in the City of London. Camden Town, where Bob Cratchit lives, was a district of small rented houses a few miles north, where rents were lower, and Bob walks there and back every day. The same reader also knew the workhouses, which the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 had made the centre of public help for people without money, and Scrooge approves of them when he is asked to give to people in need.

The story is divided into five “staves”. A stave is a verse of a song, and Dickens used the word in place of “chapter”: the title page calls the book “A Christmas Carol in Prose”.