“Bah, Humbug” – an iconic line from a story we all love, said by a character that was written for us to hate. A week before Christmas in 1843, Chapman & Hall published a novella by Charles Dickens that would become one of the most popular stories that still inspires millions of people. A Christmas Carol turns 176 years old this year and over the course of its long life, it has become so iconic, that even if you’ve never read the book, you probably know what it’s about.

 A Christmas Carol takes place on a cold, snowy Christmas Eve in London, England, during the Victorian period in the 1840’s. It is a story of a man who feels no love or joy in his heart, the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, the bah-humbug-shouting man who hates Christmas, charity, the poor, and everything besides his own goodwill. To be more exact, these are his own words at the beginning – “If I could work my will, every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!” He is described as ‘a tight-fisted hand at the grind-stone’, this metaphor suggests that Scrooge works hard for his money but is very tight with it. Dickens also uses the harshest weather to describe him ‘the heaviest rain, and snow and hail and sleet, could boast of the advantage over him in only one respect.’ indicating how horrible of a man Scrooge is, which shows the reader that Scrooge’s personality will play an important role throughout the book.  The story unfolds when he is visited by three ghosts – the ghost of the past, the present and the future. Over the course of his three separate journeys with them, he evolves into someone different, a person that he buried deep inside of him many years ago.

A Christmas Carol could be considered as a metaphor for life. The amount of life lessons that can be learnt from this book is tremendous. One of them being that as uncomfortable as we might feel about it, time only moves in one direction – forward. So, we should live our lives to the fullest, for there may be no tomorrow. Another reason that makes A Christmas Carol so beloved is its morality, the way Scrooge remembers his lost humanity and is led to find it in others. With the ghost of the past he re-experiences the loneliness of boarding school, his father’s cold disapproval and the kindness of his sister. He reminisces his most authentic memories, when he was still innocent and happy. One more great lesson from this novel, that applies to all the generations is that it shows us how easy it is to get caught up in the materialism that surrounds us, especially during the holiday season. Nowadays, we fixate so much on sales and buying many things, that we forget spending quality time with those we care about, and that they are really what should be our priority. Another aspect of Dickens’s original tale is the idea of learning to be compassionate, generous and kind, a timeless aspiration for every generation. Dickens also speaks about ignorance and want. He demonstrates a world in which the poor and suffering are ignored and taken advantage of.

Opposite from Scrooge’s initial statement, this is what he has to say in the end  – “I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future.” by which Dickens suggests to us the importance of carrying out that philosophy year-round, not just for one day. A Christmas Carol has withstood the test of time and will never cease to touch peoples’ hearts.

With A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens created a modern fairy tale and shaped our ideas of Christmas. The tale of the solitary miser Ebenezer Scrooge, who is taught the true meaning of the season by a series of ghostly visitors and given a second chance, was conjured up by Dickens during one of his London night walks, who ‘wept and laughed’ as he composed it. Taken to readers’ hearts for its humor, compassion and message of redemption, it remains his best-loved book.

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On this day in 1843, Charles Dickens’ classic story A Christmas Carol is published.

Dickens was born in 1812 and attended school in Portsmouth. His father, a clerk in the navy pay office, was thrown into debtors’ prison in 1824, and 12-year-old Charles was sent to work in a factory. The miserable treatment of children and the institution of the debtors’ jail became topics of several of Dickens’ novels.

In his late teens, Dickens became a reporter and started publishing humorous short stories when he was 21. In 1836, a collection of his stories, Sketches by Boz, later known as The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, was published. The same year, he married Catherine Hogarth, with whom he would have nine children. The short sketches in his collection were originally commissioned as captions for humorous drawings by caricature artist Robert Seymour, but Dickens’ whimsical stories about the kindly Samuel Pickwick and his fellow club members soon became popular in their own right. Only 400 copies were printed of the first installment, but by the 15th episode 40,000 copies were printed. When the stories were published in book form in 1837, Dickens quickly became the most popular author of the day.

The success of the Pickwick Papers was soon reproduced with Oliver Twist (1838) and Nicholas Nickleby (1839). In 1841, Dickens published two more novels, then spent five months in the United States, where he was welcomed as a literary hero. Dickens never lost momentum as a writer, churning out major novels every year or two, often in serial form. Among his most important works are David Copperfield (1850), Great Expectations (1861), and A Tale of Two Cities (1859).

Beginning in 1850, he published his own weekly circular of fiction, poetry, and essays called Household Words. In 1858, Dickens separated from his wife and began a long affair with a young actress. He gave frequent readings, which became immensely popular. He died in 1870 at the age of 58, with his last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, still unfinished.

The collection contains:

1. Great Expectations – Pip doesn’t expect much from life . . . His sister makes it clear that her orphaned little brother is nothing but a burden on her. But suddenly things begin to change. Pip’s narrow existence is blown apart when he finds an escaped criminal, is summoned to visit a mysterious old woman and meets the icy beauty Estella. Most astoundingly of all, an anonymous person gives him money to begin a new life in London. Are these events as random as they seem? Or does Pip’s fate hang on a series of coincidences he could never have expected?

2. Oliver Twist – story of the orphan Oliver, who runs away from the workhouse only to be taken in by a den of thieves, shocked readers when it was first published. Dickens’s tale of childhood innocence beset by evil depicts the dark criminal underworld of a London peopled by vivid and memorable characters – the arch-villain Fagin, the artful Dodger, the menacing Bill Sikes and the prostitute Nancy. Combining elements of Gothic Romance, the Newgate Novel and popular melodrama, Dickens created an entirely newkind of fiction, scathing in its indictment of a cruel society, and pervaded by an unforgettable sense of threat and mystery.

3. A Christmas Carol – Scrooge is a mean old man with no friends or family to love him – he’s just so miserable and bitter! One freezing cold Christmas eve, three ghosts pay Scrooge a visit and an eerie night-time journey begins. The Christmas spirits are here to show Scrooge the error of his nasty ways. By visiting his past, present and future, will Scrooge learn to love Christmas and the others around him?

We will be posting about his books and interesting facts about his life during the week, meanwhile, here is the Oscar winner cartoon of 1971 based on the story by Charles Dickens – “A Christmas Carol”.