A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas, was first published December 19 1843. It was to become one of the key cultural references for a modern Christmas.
- Dickens wrote the novella in only six weeks while taking night time walks in London. Dickens had written three Christmas stories prior to the novella.
- At 30,000 words it is one of his shorter works, and takes about three and a half hours to read. Reading level is 6.7.
- The novella was a break out from what Dickens expected would be his signature novel, Martin Chuzzelwit. Martin Chuzzelwit is one of his least popular novels, A Christmas Carol his most popular.
- The novella was first published on December 19, 1843, and sold out quickly. Dickens didn’t earn much money from early editions due to production costs. Dickens was very fastidious about the endpapers and how the book was bound. Reviews were largely positive, but Mark Twain, then aged 32, dismised it as “glittering frostwork.”
- The location of Scrooge’s counting house is believed to be on Newman’s Court, off Cornhill in the City of London; the courtyard where the house in which he endured his Christmas Eve encounter with the spirits has also been identified by London tour guides.
- “The ancient tower of a church, whose gruff old bell was always peeping slily down at Scrooge out of a gothic window in the wall” has been identified as St Michael, Cornhill, which stands almost directly across the road from Newman’s Court.
- Scrooge stops to take “his melancholy dinner in his melancholy tavern.” Although not named, contenders around Cornhill include Garraway’s, Simpson’s and the George and Vulture in St Michael’s Alley.
- The most famous doorknocker in literature was reportedly inspired by a particularly grotesque specimen that Dickens spotted in Craven Street, off Strand.
- Scrooge’s home is not located in the novella, but he lived in “a gloomy suite of rooms in a lowering pile of building up a yard, where it had so little business to be, that one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was a young house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses, and forgotten the way out again.” Candidates around Cornhill include Wardrobe Place, Lion Court, Groveland Court and Brabant Court, off Philpot Lane.
- A Christmas Carol was written as social commentary, reflecting Dickens’ dedication to helping the underserved, , and was inspired following a visit to the Field Lane Ragged School, one of several establishments for London’s street children.
- Dickens bound and decorated the heavily revised handwritten manuscript before gifting it to his friend Thomas Mitton.
- There are over 100 versions of A Christmas Carol, including a video game and a TV-movie with zombies. More than 20 TV shows have featured episodes inspired by A Christmas Carol. There are two ballet and four opera versions of A Christmas Carol, including The Passion of Scrooge.
- Bob Cratchit’s house was located by the author in Camden Town, with 16 Bayham Street a contender, the address to which the Dickens family came on their return to London from Kent when Charles was nine years old.
