of the Children’s Employment Commission, which he had received in December 1840 and February 1843 respectively. While he had initially pledged to write an article or pamphlet ‘on behalf of the poor man’s child’, promising several times to produce an article for the Edinburgh Review, he later determined to channel his efforts into fiction, rather than a factual account, and A Christmas Carol was born.
Publishing context
A Christmas Carol was something of an experiment for Dickens and he had high hopes for its commercial success. It was the first of his popular Christmas books and it remains, without doubt, Dickens’ best-loved festive tale. Dickens originally produced the story as a rapid way of clearing a debt with his publishers Chapman and Hall. Visually, the novella was stunning and obviously designed to be a Christmas gift. The book was beautifully bound and incorporated colour plates and woodcuts by the artist John Leech. Aesthetically pleasing though the book was, production costs ate into Dickens’ profits. The initial print run of six thousand copies sold out within a matter of days, yet Dickens made only two hundred and thirty pounds from the venture (Schlicke, p.98).
GENRE, STRUCTURE & LANGUAGE
Genre
The work’s title should alert us to Dickens’ own sense of how it should be perceived. It is, somewhat paradoxically, a ‘Carol in Prose’, suggesting a light, musical theme, but it is also, according to its subtitle, ‘A Ghost Story of Christmas’. In some respects, Dickens was engaged in creating his own genre in writing A Christmas Carol. The novella was the first of a sequence of ‘Christmas Books’ Dickens produced in the 1840s. Ruth Glancy has argued that these small volumes (The Chimes, 1844; The Cricket on the Hearth, 1845; The Battle of Life, 1846 and The Haunted Man, 1847) ‘changed the course of English publishing’ (in Schlicke, p.97). Dickens later wrote of what he called his ‘Carol philosophy’ (Letters: 4, 328), thus demonstrating his comprehension of his work’s remarkable impact upon his culture and its understanding of Christmas.
A Christmas Carol is partly a Christmas morality tale, in which evil is exposed, virtuous characters (like the Cratchits) are rewarded, and everyone celebrates at the conclusion. There are, of course, issues raised by the novella that remain unresolved. The sinister children of men, Want and Ignorance, do not go away just because Scrooge has been reformed, but the narrator tells us nothing of their future and the work’s wider social critique quietly fades away.
Dickens’ decision to politicise his first Christmas book was fraught with risk, and it is a testament to his skill in balancing the cheerful with the bleak that the work was so well received by his readers. It is therefore hardly surprising that he limits the work’s true terror, by refusing to dwell on society’s enormous social divisions. While Christmas is traditionally regarded as a time to think of those who are not so fortunate, it is also a time when readers wish to escape from their day-to-day responsibilities. Dickens therefore had to measure his novella’s narrative tone very carefully, taking care not to articulate his broad political arguments too forcefully.
The Gothic
Its important social commentary aside, A Christmas Carol is also a thrilling ghost story that is, at times, chilling and terrifying and at others side-splittingly funny. Dickens carefully blends realism and the supernatural to create a world in which the Gothic and the mundane sit side by side. Much of Dickens’ early writing drew upon Gothic conventions, and although he was primarily a realist writer, he interwove Gothic tales into novels including The Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby. Following the publication of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto in 1764, the Gothic genre became a highly popular form; Dickens was certainly familiar with the work of Gothic novelists including Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis. Eighteenth-century Gothic writing was highly formulaic and often remarkably melodramatic. The action usually took place in a labyrinthine castle or house and often involved a virtuous and vulnerable heroine fleeing a number of apparently supernatural horrors. Jane Austen ruthlessly parodied the absurdity of Gothic conventions in Northanger Abbey (1818), and although Gothic novels themselves fell out of fashion until a revival of interest towards the end of the nineteenth century, novelists including Dickens often drew upon Gothic conventions in order to sensationalise their writing.
With its dark, chilly setting and its supernatural visitors, A Christmas Carol certainly draws on elements of the Gothic novel. Thus, Scrooge’s door-knocker can turn into Jacob Marley’s face, and the reader will accept this as a reality within the limits of the story. The narrator provides a number of descriptions in which Gothic elements are interwoven with freezing, icy imagery to emphasise the atmosphere of mystery and to remind us of the protagonist’s icy heart:
The ancient tower of a church, whose gruff old bell was always peeping slily down at Scrooge out of a Gothic window in the wall, became invisible, and struck the hours and quarters in the clouds, with tremulous vibrations afterwards, as if its teeth were chattering in its frozen head up there. (p.39)
The tower and the bell, imported directly from the eighteenth-century Gothic novel, instantly convey the darkness and fear to follow. They also provide a superb contrast with the Christmas morning scenes, which are notable for their crisp brightness. Dickens adapts the Gothic, using it intermittently in his descriptions, and juxtaposing it with the real.
Structure
The structure of A Christmas Carol is very different from any of Dickens’ other works prior to the 1840s, and his decision to write a novella reflects an understanding of the need for a piece of short, light reading during the festive season.
In terms of its internal structure, the story is particularly concerned with time, to the extent that it can be considered a time-travel narrative. Dickens is somewhat cavalier with the constraints of the clock, as the ghosts somehow truncate their visitations into a single night, while moving backwards and forwards in time. Scrooge goes to bed at two o’clock, yet as he waits for the first ghost, he hears the clock strike midnight (p.53). Scrooge awakens to see the second ghost at one (p.71), which is at the same time as the first spirit finally appears, but then the clock strikes twelve again (p.94) when the last spirit materialises. Scrooge then awakes to realise that somehow the ghosts have compressed their visions into a single night (p.112). Dickens’ playful attitude towards time blurs the boundaries between the real and the imaginary, while at the same time highlighting the mysterious otherworldliness of Scrooge’s encounter.
Aside from the ghostly visitors, the work is skilfully organised so that Dickens’ readers move between its important socio-political message and the festive hilarity in which some of its more lovable characters engage. It is divided into five ‘staves’ – like a song – suggesting a lightness that is belied by some of its content. While the three main visitations take place in the middle of the story, scenes from Scrooge’s current life, before and after his conversion, frame his supernatural adventures with the ghosts, who embody different aspects of Christmas.
It is significant that the Ghost of Christmas Present sits at the very centre of the novella. Part of Dickens’ message is a call for people to live in the present and to take care of those around them, rather than hoarding up wealth for an indefinite future. Postponing this most vocally critical of the spirits to the middle stave also allows Dickens to begin with a festive tone, before giving way to forceful social indictment. Then, through the device of the silent ghost, he leaves his readers to offload their guilt, responsibility and anxieties onto the narrative gap left by the spirit’s uncanny voicelessness. Lest the reader is overwhelmed by the graphic depiction of the ‘surplus population’ and their foetid living conditions, Dickens then shifts back to celebratory mode in the novel’s final stave, restoring the festive atmosphere,
