A Christmas Carol Totally Explained

Everything about A Christmas Carol totally explained

A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas (commonly known as A Christmas Carol) is a novella by Charles Dickens first published on December 19, 1843 with illustrations by John Leech. The story was an instant success, selling over six thousand copies in one week, and the tale has become one of the most popular and enduring Christmas stories of all time.
Contemporaries noted that the story's popularity played a critical role in redefining the importance of Christmas and the major sentiments associated with the holiday. A Christmas Carol was written during a time of decline in the old Christmas traditions. "If Christmas, with its ancient and hospitable customs, its social and charitable observances, were in danger of decay, this is the book that would give them a new lease", said English poet Thomas Hood.

Plot introduction

A Christmas Carol is a Victorian morality tale of an old and bitter miser, Ebenezer Scrooge, who undergoes a profound experience of redemption over the course of one night. Mr. Scrooge is a financier/money-changer who has devoted his life to the accumulation of wealth. He holds anything other than money in contempt, including friendship, love and the Christmas season.

Explanation of the book's title

Originally a medieval round dance and then a word for a particular type of ballad, by Dickens' time the word carol had come closer to its modern meaning, being a joyful hymn specific to Christmas. Dickens takes this musical analogy further, dividing the novella into five "staves", instead of chapters.
This story is about Christmas and a ghost

Characters

Supporting

Two portly gentlemen collecting donations for "some slight provision for the poor and destitute" at Christmas

Fezziwig

Fan

Belle

Mrs. Cratchit

Peter Cratchit

Martha Cratchit

Belinda Cratchit

Two unnamed "smaller Cratchits", a boy and a girl

A young boy and girl, Ignorance and Want, respectively

Dick Wilkins

A trio of thieves who plunder Scrooge's house after his death:

Scrooge's unnamed charwoman, who sells (among other things) his bed curtains and the shirt he was originally meant to be buried in (she took it off his dead body)
Mrs. Dilber, Scrooge's laundress
An unnamed undertaker's assistant

Old Joe, a fence who buys the dead Scrooge's belongings from the trio of thieves

Major themes

The story deals extensively with two of Dickens' recurrent themes, social injustice and poverty, the relationship between the two, and their causes and effects. It was written to be abrupt and forceful with its message, with a working title of "The Sledgehammer." The first edition of A Christmas Carol was illustrated by John Leech, a politically radical artist who in the cartoon "Substance and Shadow" printed earlier in 1843 had explicitly criticised artists who failed to address social issues. Dickens wrote in the wake of British government changes to the welfare system known as the Poor Laws, changes which required among other things, welfare applicants to "work" on treadmills, as Scrooge points out. Dickens asks, in effect, for people to recognise the plight of those whom the Industrial Revolution has displaced and driven into poverty, and the obligation of society to provide for them humanely. Failure to do so, the writer implies through the personification of Ignorance and Want as ghastly children, will result in an unnamed "Doom" for those who, like Scrooge, believe their wealth and status qualifies them to sit in judgement on the poor rather than to assist them.
Scrooge “embodies all the selfishness and indifference of the prosperous classes who parrot phrases about the ‘surplus population’ and think their social responsibilities fully discharged when they've paid their taxes.”

Allusions to actual history, geography and current science

Scrooge offends the Ghost of Christmas Present by suggesting that the Spirit's name is linked to a recent attempt to close bakers' shops on Sundays and Christmas Day. (Poor people like the Cratchits, who had no oven at home, took their Sunday and Christmas meals to the bakers' to be roasted just as Dickens describes in the book, because the law forbade bread to be baked on that day. Closing the shops would deprive them of what might be their only hot meat meal of the week.) The Spirit angrily retorts:

“There are some upon this earth of yours...who lay claim to know us, and who do their deed of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and to all our kith and kin, as if they'd never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us." (The Ghost of Christmas Present, A Christmas Carol, Stave Three)

This is a reference to the repeated attempts during the 1830s of Sir Andrew Agnew, MP for Wigtownshire, to introduce a Sunday Observance Bill in Parliament which would have closed the bakeries and restricted many other Sunday pleasures of the poorer classes. Dickens was violently opposed to Agnew's plans and had attacked them in a pamphlet published under a pseudonym.

Dickens' reading

A Christmas Carol was the subject of Dickens' first ever public reading, given in Birmingham Town Hall to the Industrial and Literary Institute on 27 December 1852. This was repeated three days later to an audience of 'working people', and was a great success by his own account and that of newspapers of the time. Over the years Dickens edited the piece down and adapted it for a listening, rather than reading, audience. Excerpts from A Christmas Carol remained part of Dickens' public readings until his death.

Adaptations and sequels

The work has been adapted to theatre, opera, film, radio, and television countless times.

Further Information

Get more info on 'A Christmas Carol'.

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