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Feasting, games, and domestic dramas were the order of the ‘twelve days of Christmas’ in the 1840s Dickens household. His bitterness at the whole affair resurfaced years later when he came to describe the labyrinthine and corrupt workings of the Court of Chancery in Bleak House (1853).ĭickens had warm memories of his own childhood Christmases and, now the father of a young family (as was Prince Albert), made the annual event a merry holiday. Dickens took the publishers of the pirated edition to court but, even though he won the case, he found himself liable for costs of around £700 when the guilty party declared bankruptcy. Worse was to follow when a plagiarized version of the book appeared in January 1844. Dickens had hoped the book would clear his debts with Chapman and Hall but the lavish production, including four woodcuts and four colour plates by John Leech, meant Dickens only made £230 from the first printing. The volume, published by Chapman and Hall on 19 December 1843, was an immediate success and the initial print run of 6,000 copies sold out within a matter of days.
#Note version of the christmas carol full
A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas, to give the work its full title, was the first, and the most popular, of Dickens’s series of Christmas books. John Leech’s illustration of the ghost of the paganistic Christmas Present from the first edition of A Christmas Carol, 1843. The famous spirit of Christmas designed by the artist John Leech for the first edition of A Christmas Carol clearly draws on classic pagan iconography: The ghosts are imported from folklore and legend, not the Christian gospels. Dickens subtitled his story ‘A Ghost Story for Christmas’. Shortly after the arrival of the Christmas tree into the British parlour, Dickens, with A Christmas Carol, institutionalised what one could call the modern ‘spirit of Christmas’.
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There is no Biblical warrant for Christ’s day of birth being 25 December. Both the tannenbaum and the Yule log (along with mistletoe) were incorporated into Christian festivity from pre-Christian pagan rituals associated with the seasonal turn of the year – the rebirth of the land and the green gods.
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The Christmas tree replaced the traditional British ‘yule log’ – wood designed to give winter warmth, not something to deck with pretty lights, fairies, favours and (round its base) presents. 1841 is the normally given as the date for this happy importation. It was Albert, for example, who brought from his native Germany the tannenbaum, or Christmas Tree. He is buried in Westminster Abbey.Prince Albert – the newly installed husband of Queen Victoria – is popularly associated with institutionalising the British family Christmas, an institution which is still with us. Charles Dickens died on 9 June 1870, leaving his last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, unfinished. Many other novels followed and The Old Curiosity Shop brought Dickens international fame and he became a celebrity in America as well as Britain. The serialisation of Oliver Twist began in 1837 while The Pickwick Papers was still running. In the same year he married the daughter of his friend George Hogarth, Catherine Hogarth. The Pickwick Papers, his first commercial success, was published in 1836. His career as a writer of fiction started in 1833 when his short stories and essays began to appear in periodicals. Fagin is named after a boy Dickens disliked at the factory. When Dickens was twelve years old he was send to work in a shoe polish factory because his family had been taken to the debtors' prison. His father was a clerk in the navy pay office, who was well paid but often ended up in financial troubles. Charles Dickens was born in Hampshire on February 7, 1812.