Due to the Newfound _____ of Mr. Scrooge, Tiny Tim and His Family Enjoyed a Splendid Holiday Season.

Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim-by Frederick Barnard 1877

Information technology is interesting to note that the now famous scene, Bob Cratchit with Tiny Tim on his shoulder, was non illustrated in the original version.

Fezziwig Ball

"Clear away! In that location was nothing they wouldn't accept cleared away, or couldn't have cleared abroad, with old Fezziwig looking on. It was done in a infinitesimal. Every movable was packed off, as if it were dismissed from public life for evermore; the floor was swept and watered, the lamps were trimmed, fuel was heaped upon the burn; and the warehouse was as snug, and warm, and dry, and bright a ball-room, as y'all would desire to see upon a winter'southward night.

In came a fiddler with a music book, and went upwardly to the lofty desk-bound, and fabricated an orchestra of it, and tuned similar fifty breadbasket-aches. In came Mrs Fezziwig, 1 vast substantial grin. In came the three Miss Fezziwigs, beaming and lovable. In came the vi immature followers whose hearts they bankrupt" (Christmas Books-A Christmas Carol, p. 31).

Learn more nearly the dance performed at Fezziwig's Christmas Ball:
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Camden Boondocks

In 1822 x yr old Dickens moved with his family unit to 16 Bayham Street, Camden Boondocks, in London. Dickens would later describe the surface area "every bit shabby, dingy, damp and mean a neighborhood equally ane would want to see" (Ackroyd, 1990, p. 57-58). He used the house as a model for the home of the Cratchits in A Christmas Carol. Dickens would later use the house again as the home of the Micawbers in David Copperfield.

Piracy

A Christmas Carol was published during the calendar week before Christmas 1843 and was an instant sensation but, due to the high production costs, Dickens' earning from the sales were lower than expected. In addition to the disappointing profit from the volume Dickens was enraged that the work was instantly the victim of pirated editions. Copyright laws in England were often loosely enforced and a complete lack of international copyright police force had been Dickens' theme during his trip to America the year before. He concluded up spending more money fighting pirated editions of the book than he was making from the book itself (Patten, 1978, p. 148-151).

A Christmas Carol

Dickens called his niggling Christmas book a carol; carol beingness a song or carol of joy celebrating the nativity of Christ. He carries the pretense further by calling the chapters staves; a stave being an archaic form of stanza or verse of a vocal. He used similar schemes in two subsequent Christmas books: The Chimes, in which he called the chapters "quarters" as in the tolling of the clock, and The Cricket on the Hearth, where the book is divided into "chirps".

Bullheaded Man'southward Vitrify

At Scrooge's nephew Fred's Christmas party they play bullheaded human being's vitrify, a popular Victorian parlor game. In this detail game the blind man, Topper, and Fred team up to allow Topper to exist able to run into through the blindfold so that he can catch a lady whom he has his eye on:

"At that place was first a game at blind-human'southward buff. Of course there was. And I no more believe Topper was actually bullheaded than I believe he had eyes in his boots. My stance is, that information technology was a done thing between him and Scrooge's nephew; and that the Ghost of Christmas Present knew information technology. The way he went after that plump sister in the lace tucker, was an outrage on the credulity of human being nature. Knocking down the fire-irons, tumbling over the chairs, bumping confronting the piano, smothering himself among the curtains, wherever she went, there went he. He always knew where the plump sister was. He wouldn't catch everyone else" (Christmas Books-A Christmas Ballad, p. 53-54).

Lionel Barrymore

A Christmas Carol became function of the celebration of Christmas in America due in part to Lionel Barrymore'south annual (1931-1954) radio prove where he played the Dickensian miser. That role was instrumental in his existence cast equally Henry F. Potter in It's a Wonderful Life.

Charles Dickens pared downwardly A Christmas Carol for his public readings. Read an annotated version of Dickens' own reading text that can exist read in a unmarried sitting!

Charles Dickens and The Ghost Club

The Ghost Social club was founded in London in 1862 and, after initially receiving some low-cal-hearted ridicule in the press, Charles Dickens joined the lodge, lending it a degree of respectability. The club discussed and investigated ghosts and paranormal activities. Afterwards Dickens' death in 1870 the club seems to have dissolved. It enjoyed a resurgence in the early on 1880s and is still in being today.

What is your favorite film version of A Christmas Carol?

Praise for the Carol

Charles Dickens' friend and biographer, John Forster, relayed the outpouring of praise from readers Dickens received:

"There poured upon its author daily, all through that Christmas fourth dimension, letters from complete strangers to him which I remember reading with a wonder of pleasure; not literary at all, but of the simplest domestic kind; of which the general burden was to tell him, amid many confidences, about their homes, how the Ballad had come to he read aloud there, and was to be kept upon a piffling shelf by itself, and was to do them no end of good. Annihilation more to exist said of it will non add much to this" (Forster, 1899, v. 1, p. 346).

The Spirit at your Elbow

Part of the charm of A Christmas Carol is in the way Dickens addresses the reader, as if he is sitting abreast you telling the story:

"The curtains of his bed were drawn aside; and Scrooge, starting up into a half-recumbent attitude, plant himself confront to face with the unearthly company who drew them: as close to information technology equally I am at present to y'all, and I am standing in the spirit at your elbow" (Christmas Books-A Christmas Carol, p. 24).

Charles Dickens'

A Christmas Carol

A Christmas Carol in Prose - Being a Ghost Story of Christmas

A Christmas Carol - Published in one book - December 1843

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Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim-by Jessie Wilcox 1912

Charles Dickens began writing A Christmas Carol in October, 1843 finishing it by the end of November in time to be published for Christmas with illustrations by John Leech. Feuding with his publishers, Dickens financed the publishing of the volume himself, ordering lavish binding, aureate edging, and mitt-colored illustrations and so setting the price at no more than five shillings (Slater, 2009, p. 220). This combination resulted in disappointingly low profits despite high sales. In the first few days of its release the book sold six k copies and its popularity connected to abound (Patten, 1978, p. 146). The beginning and best of his Christmas Books, A Christmas Ballad has become a Christmas tradition and hands Dickens' best-known book.

Plot

(contains spoilers)

Ebenezer Scrooge is a penny-pinching miser in the first degree. He cares nix for the people around him and mankind exists only for the money that can be made through exploitation and intimidation. He particularly detests Christmas which he views as 'a time for finding yourself a yr older, and not an hour richer'. Scrooge is visited, on Christmas Eve, by the ghost of his former partner Jacob Marley who died seven Christmas Eves ago.

Marley, a miser from the same mold as Scrooge, is suffering the consequences in the afterlife and hopes to help Scrooge avert his fate. He tells Scrooge that he volition be haunted by three spirits. These three spirits, the ghosts of Christmas past, present,

Scrooge and Marley-by Frederick Barnard

and future, succeed in showing Scrooge the error of his means. His glorious reformation complete, Christmas morn finds Scrooge sending a Christmas turkey to his long-suffering clerk, Bob Cratchit, and spending Christmas twenty-four hour period in the visitor of his nephew, Fred, whom he had earlier spurned.

Scrooge'south new-found benignancy continues every bit he raises Cratchit'south salary and vows to assist his family, which includes Bob'south bedridden son, Tiny Tim. In the end Dickens reports that Scrooge became "as good a friend, as adept a master, and as skilful a human being, as the good one-time city knew" (Christmas Books-A Christmas Carol, p. 76).

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Complete Listing of Characters:

Character descriptions contain spoilers

Belle Caroline Cratchit, Bob Cratchit, Mrs Cratchit, Belinda Cratchit, Martha Cratchit, Peter Cratchit, Tiny Tim Dilber, Mrs Fan Fezziwig

Fezziwig, Mrs Fred Ghost of Christmas By Ghost of Christmas Present Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come Marley, Jacob Joe, Old Scrooge, Ebenezer Topper Wilkins, Dick

A Christmas Carol Links:

Dickens and Christmas
Dickens' Christmas Books
Dickens A Christmas Carol reading text
Thackeray on A Christmas Carol
Download A Christmas Ballad in a text file
The Second Greatest Christmas Story Ever Told - By Thomas J. Burns (Originally published in Reader'due south Digest, December 1989)
SparkNotes - A Christmas Carol

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Original Illustrations

John Leech provided 8 illustrations for A Christmas Carol. Four woodcuts and 4 mitt colored etchings:

A Christmas Carol: The Films and the Players

(IMDB)

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My Favorite Film Version of A Christmas Carol

Scrooge's grave at St. Republic of chad's churchyard

My favorite film version of A Christmas Carol is the 1984 made-for-Goggle box version starring George C. Scott as Ebenezer Scrooge. Faithful to Dickens' original with much of the dialogue lifted right out of the book, this version includes an excellent cast: Susannah York, Roger Rees, David Warner, and Edward Woodward, supporting the cranky Scott who is perfect as Scrooge.

The film was shot in locations in and around the town of Shrewsbury, England and has the gritty look and feel of early nineteenth-century London. Scrooge's grave from the film can however exist seen in the graveyard of St Chad's church building.

Fifteen Bob a Week

The miserly Scrooge paid his clerk, Bob Cratchit, a weekly salary of fifteen shillings (cockney slang for shilling was "bob"). Bob "pocketed on Saturdays but fifteen copies of his Christian proper noun" (Christmas Books-A Christmas Ballad, p. 43).

Co-ordinate to C. Z. Barnett in his play A Christmas Carol or The Miser'southward Alarm (1844) Cratchit would accept spent a week's wages to buy the ingredients for the Christmas banquet: seven shillings for the goose, v for the pudding, and three for the onions, sage and oranges.

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Ignorance and Desire

One major theme in A Christmas Carol was rooted in Dickens' observations of the plight of the children of London's poor. It has been said of the times that sex was the simply affordable pleasure for the poor; the result was thousands of children living in unimaginable poverty, filth, and affliction.

Ignorance and Want
by John Leech

In 1839 nigh half of all funerals in London were for children under the age of ten (Ackroyd, 1990, p. 384). Those who survived grew up without education or resource and virtually no chance to escape the cycle of poverty. Dickens felt that this savage circle could only be broken through instruction and became interested in the Ragged Schools in London.

Ragged Schools were gratuitous schools, run through charity, in which the poorest children received religious education and a rudimentary education. Dickens generally applauded the work of these schools although he disapproved of introducing religious doctrine at the expense of a practical pedagogy which would assistance the pupil become a self-sufficient member of society (Ackroyd, 1990, p. 406-407). Despite the availability of these schools, virtually poor children remained uneducated due to the demand for child labor and the apathy of parents, wretchedly poor and uneducated themselves.

Dickens introduces these children in A Christmas Carol through the allegorical twins, Ignorance and Want. The Ghost of Christmas Present shows them, wretched and almost animal in appearance, to Scrooge with the alert: "This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, merely most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased" (Christmas Books-A Christmas Ballad, p. 57).

Charles Dickens connected to support teaching for the poor through his works merely compulsory education for all did non come most until 1870, the year of Dickens' death.

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The Death of Tiny Tim

Expiry of Tiny Tim-past Sol Eytinge 1869

Of all the affecting scenes from A Christmas Ballad none touches the middle more than the decease of the crippled Tiny Tim, foreshadowed to Scrooge by the Ghost of Christmas Withal to Come up, especially to Victorian readers. Large families and child mortality were mutual in the 19th century and many readers may have suffered firsthand the loss of a child.

Michael Patrick Hearn, in his book The Annotated Christmas Carol, notes that Clarence Cook, reporting for the New York Tribune afterwards attending a public reading by Dickens of A Christmas Carol in Boston in 1867, noted that the passage of Tiny Tim's death "brought out and then many pocket handkerchiefs that information technology looked as if a snow-storm had somehow gotten into the hall without tickets" (Hearn, 2004, p. 249, north. 2).

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Expressionless every bit a Doornail

Dickens begins A Christmas Carol by impressing upon the reader that Jacob Marley was dead. In fact, he was "dead as a doornail." He goes on to question this well-known simile:

"Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is specially expressionless near a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail every bit the deadest slice of ironmongery in the merchandise. Only the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall non disturb it, or the Land'southward done for. You will therefore permit me to echo, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-smash" (Christmas Books-A Christmas Carol, p. 7).

The phrase "dead as a doornail" appears every bit early on every bit the fourteenth-century in The Vision of Piers Plowman and later in Shakespeare's Henry IV. However, the origin of the phrase is unknown. One possible explanation is that doors were built using only wood boards and hand forged nails, the nails were long enough to dead nail the (vertical) wooden panels and (horizontal) stretcher boards securely together, so they would not easily pull apart. This was washed by pounding the protruding point of the blast over and downward into the woods. A nail that was bent in this fashion (and thus not easily pulled out) was said to exist "expressionless", thus "dead as a doornail." [Wiktionary]

Thackeray on the Carol

William Makepeace Thackeray in Fraser's Magazine (February 1844) pronounced the book, "a national benefit and to every man or woman who reads it, a personal kindness. The last two people I heard speak of information technology were women; neither knew the other, or the author, and both said, past way of criticism, 'God bless him!'"

Thackeray wrote almost Tiny Tim, "There is not a reader in England but that petty beast volition exist a bond of union between the author and him; and he will say of Charles Dickens, equally the woman just at present, 'GOD Anoint HIM!' What a feeling this is for a author to inspire, and what a reward to reap!" (Frasers, 1844, p. 167-169 signed with the initials G.A.T. for Thackeray'southward pen name Michael Angelo Titmarsh).

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Sabbatarianism

Sabbatarianism, the Christian doctrine of strict observance of Sunday equally a holy 24-hour interval reserved for worship, was attacked past Dickens throughout his life. In 1836 he published the pamphlet Sunday Under 3 Heads in opposition to a Bill that would have extended already strict limitations to Sunday recreation. Dickens felt that these Bills were an try by the upper classes to control the lives of the lower classes disguised equally religious piety (Slater, 2009, p. 70-71). He argued that Sunday was the only day that the poor and working classes could enjoy unproblematic pleasures that the upper and middle classes enjoyed all week. In A Christmas CarolDickens again voices these concerns through this exchange between Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Nowadays:

"Spirit," said Scrooge, after a moment'south thought, "I wonder you lot, of all the beings in the many worlds almost us, should desire to cramp these people'south opportunities of innocent enjoyment."

"I!" cried the Spirit.

"You lot would deprive them of their means of dining every 7th day, often the only solar day on which they can exist said to dine at all," said Scrooge. "Wouldn't you lot?"

"I!" cried the Spirit.

"Yous seek to close these places on the Seventh Day," said Scrooge. "And it comes to the same thing."

"I seek!" exclaimed the Spirit.

"Forgive me if I am wrong. Information technology has been done in your proper name, or at to the lowest degree in that of your family," said Scrooge.

"In that location are some upon this earth of yours," returned the Spirit, "who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, discrimination, and selfishness in our name, who are equally strange to the states and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and accuse their doings on themselves, not usa" (Christmas Books-A Christmas Carol, p. 43.)

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Cooking the Cratchit'southward Christmas Goose

The homes of the poor were equipped with open fireplaces for heat and cooking merely not with ovens. Thus many, like the Cratchits, took their Christmas goose or turkey to the baker's shop. Bakers were forbidden to sell on Sundays and holidays only would open their shops on these days to the poor and bake their dinners for a pocket-sized fee. Dickens tells of Master Peter Cratchit and the two younger Cratchits going to fetch their Christmas goose from the bakers (Hearn, 2004, p. 91-92, due north. 28).

Preface to the Original Edition

A Christmas Carol

I have endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to enhance the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of sense of humor 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 Retainer,
C. D.
Dec, 1843.

The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. MA 97.

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