A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
When Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in 1843, it was an overnight success. The story is the theme of the Museum’s tree for the Christmas Tree Festival this year. Christmas was becoming increasingly popular as a midwinter celebration in Victorian Britain. Yet a parliamentary report that year revealed the effects of the industrial revolution on working class children. While the middle classes prospered and feasted, the poor suffered greatly in the slums with bad housing, long working days, low wages and dangerous working conditions.
Having suffered poverty himself when young, Dickens was appalled by their plight of poor children. He saw them at work in the mines and visited the Ragged School in London which offered basic education to some of the half-starved and illiterate street children. His experiences spurred him to wrote A Christmas Carol which was published in late 1843.
It was an immediate success – the first print run sold out in days and it went into many editions. Ten years later Dickens began to give public readings of the story. It was extremely popular in the United States. It is said that after hearing a reading in Boston on Christmas Eve 1867, one factory owner decided to close it for Christmas and provide all his workers with a turkey!
The story is the theme of the Museum’s tree for the Christmas Tree Festival this year. Look out for it as you enter the church, the tree is at the entrance to the porch. See if you can spot the main characters – Scrooge with his money bag, the three ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future, Scrooge’s clerk Bob Cratchit with tiny Tim on his shoulder and with his wife and five other children. Oh and Mr & Mrs Fezziwig who were Scrooge’s first employer. And at the top of the tree is Dickens himself giving a public reading of the book.
