A Christmas Carol
Background

The writer Charles Dickens was born to a middle-class family which got into financial difficulties as a result of the spendthrift nature of his father John. In 1824 John was committed to the Marshalsea, a debtors' prison in Southwark, London. Dickens, aged 12, was forced to pawn his collection of books, leave school and work at a dirty and rat-infested shoe-blacking factory. The change in circumstances gave him what his biographer, Michael Slater, describes as a "deep personal and social outrage", which heavily influenced his writing and outlook.

By the end of 1842 Dickens was a well-established author with six major works as well as several short stories, novellas and other pieces. On 31 December that year he began publishing his novel Martin Chuzzlewit as a monthly serial; it was his favourite work, but sales were disappointing and he faced temporary financial difficulties.

Celebrating the Christmas season had been growing in popularity through the Victorian era. The Christmas tree was introduced in Britain during the 18th century, and its use was popularised by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. In the early 19th century there had been a revival of interest in Christmas carols, following a decline in popularity over the previous hundred years. The publication of Davies Gilbert 's 1823 work Some Ancient Christmas Carols, With the Tunes to Which They Were Formerly Sung in the West of England and William Sandys's 1833 collection Christmas Carols, Ancient and Modern led to a growth in the form's popularity in Britain.

Dickens had an interest in Christmas, and his first story on the subject was "Christmas Festivities", published in Bell's Weekly Messenger in 1835; the story was then published as "A Christmas Dinner" in Sketches by Boz (1836). "The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton", another Christmas story, appeared in the 1836 novel The Pickwick Papers. In the episode, a Mr Wardle describes a misanthropic sexton, Gabriel Grub, who undergoes a Christmas conversion after being visited by goblins who show him the past and future. Slater considers that "the main elements of the Carol are present in the story", but not yet in a firm form. The story is followed by a passage about Christmas in Dickens's editorial Master Humphrey's Clock. The professor of English literature Paul Davis writes that although the "Goblins" story appears to be a prototype of A Christmas Carol, all Dickens's earlier writings about Christmas influenced the story.
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