A Christmas Carol
December 19, 2013 by staff
A Christmas Carol, We’re exactly one week from Christmas Day. On this date in 1843, Charles Dickens and his publisher were putting the final touches on a thin volume, written for the holiday season, which would soon fly off the bookshelves.
In the preface to the first edition, the author wrote the following in his own hand:
I have endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it.
Their faithful Friend and Servant,
C. D.
December, 1843
With that, “A Christmas Carol,” was launched.
This magical book has proved timeless, in no small part because its prose managed simultaneously to be both spare and rich—not unlike Ebenezer Scrooge’s put-upon clerk, Bob Cratchit. The miserly boss paid his underling fifteen shillings. Dickens’ readers, knowing that the Cockney slang for a shilling was “a bob,” could only smile when the author wrote that Cratchit “pocketed on Saturdays but fifteen copies of his Christian name.”
For lovers of language, Dickens was always full of such little gifts, starting with the name Scrooge, which has entered the language, along with “Bah! Humbug!” and other Dickensian expressions.
“A Christmas Carol,” with its spirits, time-travel, and altering of the future, is not a work of realism. Nor is it secular. “It is good to be children sometimes, and never better at Christmas,” Dickens writes, “when its mighty Founder was a child himself.”
Yet it challenged readers’ consciences regardless of their religious beliefs. “Are there no workhouses?” Ebenezer Scrooge tells two visitors to his shop who’ve come seeking donations for the poor. “And the Union workhouses—are they still in operation?”
This is the theme that goes to the heart of the holiday, and the heart of Dickens’ novel, and it is a timeless one, which is why this story never gets old. Today, in American politics we are debating the wisdom of raising the minimum wage, and whether interns should be paid, and what constitutes a “living wage.”
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