Within eight days, this Yuletide ghost story of greed and generosity sold 6,000 copies, and by the following May it had gone through seven editions. And the author couldn’t complain this time, as he had in the past (and would again in the future), about the publisher: he’d financed the whole enterprise himself, including the gilt edging and hand-colored illustrations.
Believe it or not, the 31-year-old novelist, with four children already and a fifth coming in the following year, still didn’t make as much money as he wanted. A pet peeve of Dickens’ when he was visiting America in 1842—the lack of a copyright law—became an issue in this case even on his home turf, as a pirate edition came only a month after publication.
Even a successful lawsuit produced only limited results. Dickens put the offending firm out of business, but he was never able to collect from them. He ended up paying court costs of 700 pounds, leaving him with a profit by the end of the year between only 130 and 230 pounds.
This did not make the novelist happy. You’d have to look Charlie Chaplin and Irving Berlin to find two other wildly popular artists whose adult lives were so malformed by childhood poverty. He’d have to get busy again, which he promptly did: Another Christmas tale, The Cricket on the Hearth, was published almost one year to the day after A Christmas Carol.
You can trace the darkness gradually descending on Dickens in how he depicted Christmas over the years. A Christmas Carol and The Cricket on the Hearth were two of five Christmas novels he wrote from 1843 through 1848. But the season is mentioned in four other novels, including his first, the sunny The Pickwick Papers, and the last, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, when a murder occurs in the season.
In the wider sense, the comparatively disappointing lack of profits coming Dickens’ way after A Christmas Carol didn’t matter. The important thing was that Dickens—a novelist whose newest novels had been as eagerly anticipated as J.K. Rowling has been in our time—had reestablished himself as a publishing phenomenon, only months after his latest work, Martin Chuzzlewit, had annoyed American readers who resented the satire of their country.
By October 1843, monthly installments of Martin Chuzzlewit gave Dickens an idea of the changed public attitude toward him. It’s hard to know what precisely triggered the burst of creative energy that produced A Christmas Carol, but for six weeks Dickens wrote like a man possessed, during which he wept, and laughed, and wept again, and excited himself in a most extraordinary manner in the composition.”
Earlier this week, in a post on Louisa May Alcott, I alluded to Dickens’ theatrical propensities. Nowhere is that more prevalent than in A Christmas Carol. You can see how readily this work lends itself to theatrical or cinematic adaptation.
In a New York Times article last year, Anita Gates pointed out that the first and most famous of Dickens’ Christmas novels has been made into some three dozen feature films and television movies—and that’s not counting the times the plot’s been openly borrowed and transformed (A Diva’s Christmas Carol, starring Vanessa Williams) or parodied (a “WKRP in Cincinnati” episode, “Bah, Humbug!”)
I imagine that Dickens, an admirer-turned-critic of America, would snort at the notion that adaptations of his novel make it the most frequently performed play on U.S. stages. Twelve years ago, while in San Antonio for the holidays, I caught one of these productions, and I daresay that I could have gone to any major metropolis and seen it there, too.
Earlier in this post, I indicated that, though A Christmas Carol didn’t make Dickens as much money as he wanted, it wasn’t a total loss. Fifteen years after its publication, he had discovered how remunerative his own public readings of his world could be.
A seven-week series in London, followed by an even longer “Provincial Tour,” became such sensations that he would perform 500 of these between 1858 and his death in 1870. A Christmas Carol served as the centerpiece of this all-stops-out series that lined his wallet even as it taxed his strength.
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