Following the critical and popular failure of Martin Chuzzlewit, Charles Dickens' publishers propose to recoup their losses by invoking a clause in their contract with Dickens to require him to produce a Christmas story in just a month’s time --- or they will force him to repay the advance he received for Chuzzlewit.
Dickens is not interested in writing a Christmas book. He's frazzled and anxious about his mounting debts. His wife and children have become accustomed to a lavish lifestyle, ne'er-do-wells and hangers-on are always asking for loans or other favors, fickle fans have turned into critics, envious rivals are eager to take him down a notch. Memories of his impoverished childhood convince him that he will end in the poorhouse and bring on a severe case of writer’s block.
Holed up in a cheap lodging house by day and walking the streets of London by night, Dickens desperately seeks a new inspiration to rekindle the magic of Christmas for him. In her debut novel, Samantha Silva creates a parallel tale to Dickens' Christmas Carol, mixing real people and events from Dickens’ life with dreams and phantoms uncannily like his own. Silva's book, published by Flatiron Press, was named one of the 20 Indie Next Great Reads in November 2017.
A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost-Story of Christmas, was published in London by Chapman & Hall on December 19, 1843; the first edition was completely sold out by Christmas Eve. By the end of 1844, thirteen editions had been released. Dickens said he was inspired to write the story after a visit to the Field Lane Ragged School, one of several charity schools that served London's half-starved, illiterate street children.
A Christmas Carol tells the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, a mean old miser who is visited during the night of Christmas Eve by the specter of his former business partner Jacob Marley and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come. After their visits Scrooge is transformed into a kinder, gentler man.
In 1849 Dickens began public readings of the story, which proved so successful he undertook 127 further performances until 1870, the year of his death. A Christmas Carol has never been out of print and has been translated into several languages; the story has been adapted multiple times for film, stage, opera and other media. After the Nativity Story itself, A Christmas Carol is considered to be the best known and most popular Christmas story in the English language.
Click HERE to read a review from the Historical Novel Society web site.
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