At the time “A Christmas Carol” was written..., and about Charles Dickens.

photograph of Charles Dickens c. 1852

Scrooge

At the time “A Christmas Carol” was written, Dickens feared for his own future. He had six children to feed, a large house in London to maintain and a lavish lifestyle. Christmas was approaching. Yet the work he was then producing, a few chapters at a time, “Martin Chuzzlewit,’’ was not selling as well as earlier installments of “The Pickwick Papers” or “Nicholas Nickleby.” Bitterly, he confided to a friend that his bank account was bare.

“He did make money but not as much as he thought he would,’’ said Professor Slater, the author of “Charles Dickens: A Life Defined by Writing,” a new biography for Yale University Press.

Conjuring up what he described as a “Ghost of an Idea,” about a rich man’s conversion from heel to hero, he got to work. The 6,000 copies printed up in time for Christmas sold out. But because the author had splurged on hand-colored drawings in red and green ink by John Leech, one of England’s leading illustrators, the project was a financial bust.

Fortunately for Dickens, his quickie book went on to become a literary classic. So his Christmases Future were far better than his Christmases Past.



Looking over the Shoulder of the Creator of “A Christmas Carol”:

Charles Dickens left behind one, and only one, manuscript for “A Christmas Carol,” the tale he wrote in 1843 of an unfeeling rich man and the boy who pricked his conscience. Kept under lock-and-key for much of the year at the Morgan Library and Museum, the manuscript is not widely available, one reason, perhaps, why it has been all but impossible to track the many revisions Dickens made to the manuscript as he struggled to get his story right. A high-resolution copy of the manuscript's 66 pages, which you can examine below, may finally change that.

By clicking on the "T" or the page icon on the left, you can toggle between the hand-written and typed versions of each page. (Photographs by Earl Wilson/New York Times.) Click here to return to related article.

http://documents.nytimes.com/looking-over-the-shoulder-of-charles-dickens-the-man-who-wrote-of-a-christmas-carol#p=1

There, you can also find a link to the full related article, where you can also read the highly interesting reader comments.

(Source: The New York Times)