Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol Notes on the Production
WEALTH AND POVERTY IN THE WORLD OF CHARLES DICKENS
Charles Dickens lived during a period of tremendous economic development and social transition. During the Victorian Era (1837 – 1901), England enjoyed a long period of peace and prosperity during which the Industrial Revolution reached its height, and England expanded as a world power, developing interests in Hong Kong, Africa, China, and the Middle East. The expansion created new trading opportunities, and London served as a major center of commerce. Business thrived; new methods of mass production and consumption developed; the upper and middle classes grew wealthier; and Victorians believed that they lived in a time of unrivalled progress and possibility.
There was, however, a darker side to this affluence. The mechanization of
manufacturing forced members of the lower classes to abandon their farms and immigrate to cities, forming an enormous urban working class. As new factories opened, hundreds of thousands of people flocked to London, and the city’s population exploded, expanding from around 1 million in 1800 to 4.5 million in 1881. As a result, while captains of industry and the wealthy middle class enjoyed new privileges, the working poor confronted overcrowding, pollution, and disease. During the “Hungry Forties” when A Christmas Carol was written, most families subsisted on bread, tea, cheese, and potatoes; butcher’s meat (like the Cratchits’ Christmas dinner) was considered a luxury item.
Soon, members of the lower classes became so desperate for money that they performed the grimmest of tasks, often at great personal risk, to earn a day’s wage. Young men worked in mines and on the docks unloading coal, developing black lung and tuberculosis. Young women worked in match factories, suffering from “fossy jaw” (decay of the jawbones), due to their constant exposure to phosphorous fumes. Boys were apprenticed to chimney sweeps and made the treacherous climb up narrow chimney-ways to scrape away soot and creosote. Girls, as well as boys, labored in factories, working from fourteen to sixteen hours a day.
Into this social milieu entered Charles Dickens, born in Landport, Hampshire in 1812. A sharp satirist and a tireless crusader for reform, Dickens used his novels to identify the economic injustices of his era, joining such contemporaries as George Eliot, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Thomas Hardy, all of whom viewed fiction writing as, simultaneously, a form of entertainment and a canvas for social critique. Dickens focused particularly on poverty and the workhouse; he understood the evils of child labor firsthand, having worked in Warren’s Blacking Warehouse at the age of eleven while his parents and siblings lived nearby in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison. When Dickens’ paternal grandmother died, his family came into a small inheritance, and the young Charles left the warehouse and returned to school. Nevertheless, the period haunted him for the rest of his life; again and again, Dickens’ novels return to the image of a beatific yet impoverished child hero, who, by virtue alone, subverts the tyranny, indifference, or grotesquerie of the adult world.
A CHRISTMAS CAROL AND CHRISTMAS IN VICTORIAN ENGLAND
A Christmas Carol is more than just a holiday ghost story. It, like so many of Dickens’ other works, provides scathing commentary on the social injustices he saw around him.
Through Dickens’ sympathetic portrayal of characters like the Cratchits, the audience’s eyes, like Scrooge’s, are opened to the plight of the impoverished.
In argument with his publishers, Dickens financed the publishing of the lavishly illustrated and decorated book himself, pricing it at a mere 5 shillings to make it affordable for all. The book sold rapidly, but brought in disappointing profits. In subsequent seasons, Dickens wrote other holiday stories, including The Chimes (1844) and The Cricket and the Hearth (1845), though none gained the enormous popularity of A Christmas Carol.
Collectively, Dickens’ novellas helped to rekindle an otherwise flagging sense of Christmas spirit in England. Prior to the Victorian era, holiday celebrations had declined due to the legacy of Oliver Cromwell’s Puritanism which discouraged festivity, and the grim existence of factory workers during the Industrial Revolution left little sentimental feeling about the holiday. Eventually, however, the wealth generated by new industries allowed middle class citizens to take time away from work to celebrate, and this same newfound prosperity (along with new methods for mass-producing toys, dolls, games, and books) encouraged the exchange of gifts.
Additionally, in the mid-nineteenth century, a number of Christmas novelties appeared in England. John Calcott Horsley designed the first Christmas card in 1843, and in 1846, London sweet maker Tom Smith invented crackers - colored papers with sweets, toys, paper hats, or love notes wrapped inside. Additionally, many of today’s popular Christmas carols were written in the nineteenth century. Families would travel from door to door, singing for their neighbors, and wassailers would sing for food, drink, and money.
In the 1840s, Prince Albert introduced the Christmas tree to Windsor Castle, adopting the tradition from his native Germany. The practice soon become widely popular in England, and designs quickly became elaborate. A Victorian family’s Christmas tree could be decorated with everything from whistles, dolls, and wind-up toys to gingerbread men, marzipan candies, and hand-dipped candles. These innovations, along with the stories of Charles Dickens, eventually became cherished traditions, helping to revive Christmas celebrations throughout England and America and
renewing a sense of romance and possibility about the holiday.