2023-12-26 06:00:00
Charles Dickens wrote his famous short story in just six weeks
26 dic 2023 . Updated at 05:00 a.m.
Honor the Christmas in my heart and try to keep it all year round. The promise that a repentant and converted Ebenezer Scrooge makes to Spirit of Christmas Future It has been bringing tears to tears around the world for almost centuries or to be precise for 180 years. On December 19, 1843, the English writer Charles Dickens publish your Christmas story (A Christmas carol, in English), a book to which many experts attribute the renaissance that the holiday experienced in the United Kingdom and the rest of the Anglo-Saxon world.
Between 1642 and 1660 celebrating the birth of Jesus was prohibited by law in England and its colonies.. The reason? The most puritan Protestants considered that the excesses in drinking and eating that citizens incurred on those dates were sinful.
And although the veto did not eradicate the festival, it did hit it, and it was not until almost two centuries later that a resurgence of interest in it began, in part thanks to the outbreak of the industrial revolution and the arrival at the court of Prince Albert, the German husband of Queen Victoria and who introduced German traditions such as the Christmas tree.
To the previous factors we must add the financial problems that the then already renowned Dickens was going through in 1843. He was a 31-year-old man, father of four children and with another on the way, who thought he was at the top of his career, thanks to Oliver Twist y Nicholas Nickleby. However, months before, his editor revealed to him that the sales of his latest novel (The life and adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit) were not as expected and that it may be necessary to drastically reduce their monthly advances, wrote University of Oklahoma professor and Dickens expert Thomas Burns.
Fearing that he would not be able to pay his bills and would end up in prison, as happened to his father, Dickens decided to write a story about Christmas. A time that I considered to be the only time I know in the long calendar of the year, in which men and women seem (…) to freely open their closed hearts and think of other people as if they really were fellow travelers to the grave.
Inspired by life itself
The author began working on his new book in October and six weeks later he had it ready. However, Victorian society provided input for his famous characters. Thus, the miser Scrooge would be inspired by a renowned banker of the time called James Wood, who was considered the richest commoner in England.
Wood, who was born in 1756 in the English town of Gloucester (180 kilometers west of London) and inherited a shop and a bank from his father in 1802, was known for never spending money on clothes and was always very disheveled and dirty. , historian Roger Smith told the BBC.
When he died in 1836, Wood’s fortune was more than one million pounds (55 million euros today).
Dickens frequented Gloucester so he must have heard of Wood, the historian concluded.
No profit
Dickens’s eagerness to release his last book before Christmas forced him to finance the project, as his publishers doubted that it would be ready before the holidays and also that the subject would be attractive to readers. Time proved that they were wrong with both assumptions.
The first 6,000 copies of A Christmas Carol were sold out by December 23 and the author’s popularity skyrocketed. However, success did not translate into huge profits for Dickens, largely due to his decision to price his work at an affordable price (5 shillings or 30 euros at current prices).
Filed in: Charles Dickens England United Kingdom Christmas London
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