"A Christmas Carol" Published - Dec. 19, 1843

Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" was published for the first time on this day in 1843.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to This Day in History class from how Stuff
Works dot Com and from the desk of Stuff you
missed in History Class. It's the show where we explore
the past one day at a time with a quick
look at what happened today in history. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and it's Deceper nineteenth.

(00:22):
A Christmas Carol was published by Chapman and Hall on
this day in eighteen forty three. It's really likely that
you have heard this story. Benees are Scrooge, a cruel
and stingy man is mean to his employees and everyone
else around him, and on Christmas Eve he's visited by
the ghost of his former partner Jacob Marley, followed by
the spirits of Christmas past, present and future. It was written,

(00:46):
of course by Charles Dickens, and it's become a Christmas classic,
and right from the beginning when it was published, it
was an instant blockbuster. Dickens got the idea for this
in the spring of that year after he read a
report on child labor. At this point, child labor was
extremely common. Increased urbanization and industrialization in the nineteenth century

(01:09):
had led to children working in factories, often working incredibly
long hours and dangerous and inhumane conditions, often with things
like rules that seemed draconian and just truel. There were
assembly lines hauling cole dipping matches. A lot of these
working children were even housed above the factory and dormitories,

(01:31):
so their work was basically their whole lives. And for
people who were poor and could not find work, there
were workhouses, and they had appalling conditions. Going to a
workhouse was actually required by law, under the Poor Law
of eighteen thirty four. If you were poor and had
no work and couldn't support yourself, you had to go
to the poorhouse, But intentionally the poorhouses were so awful

(01:54):
no one wanted to go there. At first, Dickens had
planned to write a pamphlet that was to be called
an Appeal to the People of England on Behalf of
the poor Man's Child, And, like its name suggests, this
is going to be a pamphlet about the horrors of
poverty and child labor. But soon he decided that a
work of fiction might be more effective, and he wrote

(02:17):
that work of fiction over just a couple of months
in the fall of eighteen forty three. The big moral
of this story was that it was up to employers
to treat and pay their employees well, on a more
practical level than this benevolent goal of encouraging people to
be more generous towards the poor. Dickens also needed to

(02:38):
pay his own bills, particularly after spending a lot of
money on a tour of the United States the year before,
so he wrote a story that he thought would sell,
and it did. The first print run of A Christmas
Carol was six thousand copies and it was sold out
in a week. By the next year, there were fifteen
thousand copies in print. Although Dickens didn't actually earn as

(03:02):
much money off of it as he wanted to, a
lot of this was really of his own making. It
was at his request that they had used very fancy
gilded bindings, with the book itself full of etchings and woodcuts,
which were very expensive. He wanted this book to be beautiful,
and it was, but it was also expensive, and he
even ordered last minute changes to the title page and

(03:25):
the end pages because the first ones didn't measure up
to what he wanted. He had hoped to make a
thousand pounds off of this book, and instead his first
payment was for a hundred and thirty seven pounds. Even
though he didn't make nearly as much money as he wanted, though,
he was really really happy with how well this book

(03:46):
sold and with how much of an impact it seemed
to make in people's humanitarian perspective on the issue of
poverty and child labor. Today, there are so many adaptations
of this work, and that started pretty much immediately. People
were writing plays that were based on a Christmas carol
right from the very beginning. Today there are plays and
movies and TV shows and the musical Scrooge. It goes

(04:08):
on and on and on. It's hard to get through
a Christmas season without being reminded of it somewhere. Thanks
very much to Christopher Haciotis for his research work on
today's show. Thanks to Casey Pegraham and Chandler Mays for
their audio work on this show, And to Casey for
being so gracious that he never corrected me when I
pronounced his name the way my high school health teacher

(04:30):
did instead of the way he does. You can subscribe
to the Stay in History Class on Apple Podcasts, Google podcast,
i Heart radio app and wherever you get your podcasts,
and tune in tomorrow for the first in a series
of exits