Scrooge’s transformation is legendary. At the beginning of the story he’s a greedy, selfish person. And although I know and am as sure as it is possible for one to be of anything which has not happened that in the prodigious misery and ignorance of the swarming masses of mankind in England, the seeds of its certain ruin are sown. I have very seldom seen, in all the strange and dreadful things I have seen in London and elsewhere anything so shocking as the dire neglect of soul and body exhibited in these children. In a letter to his friend, Miss Coutts, he described what he saw at the school:

In September of 1843 Dickens visited the Field Lane Ragged School. The movement got its name from the way the children attending the school were dressed. They often wore tattered or ragged clothing. The schools provided free education for children in the inner-city. At the time that he wrote A Christmas Carol he was very concerned with impoverished children who turned to crime and delinquency in order to survive.ĭickens, as well as others, thought that education could provide a way to a better life for these children. The Ragged School movement put these ideas into action. This girl is Want.”ĭickens was involved in charities and social issues throughout his entire life. The book is as popular today as it was over 175 years ago. Charles Dickens, through the voice of Scrooge, continues to urge us to honor Christmas in our hearts and try to keep it all the year round. Sadly, A Christmas Carol wasn’t the moneymaker that Dickens hoped it would be. Sales were good, but the publication costs had been high.

There were issues with the color of the endpapers, the title page and the book binding.Ī Christmas Carol was the most successful book of the 1843 holiday season. By Christmas it sold six thousand copies and it continued to be popular into the new year. Since Dickens was paying for the publishing of the book, he wanted the book done his way. Chapman & Hall would be paid for the printing costs and receive a fixed commission on the number of copies sold. As a result, they proposed that A Christmas Carol be issued in an inexpensive collection of Dickens’s works or possibly as part of a new magazine.ĭickens was adamant that A Christmas Carol be published as a high-quality, stand-alone book.Īfter a discussion between the parties, they came to an unusual agreement.ĭickens would fund the publication of A Christmas Carol. The owners of the company began to lose faith in the marketability of Dickens’s work. Sales of Martin Chuzzlewit, also published by Chapman & Hall, had been much less than expected. However, in an interesting turn of events, Dickens paid the publishing costs himself.

Technically speaking, A Christmas Carol was published by Chapman & Hall.

Scrooge original story