A Christmas Carol went on sale just before Christmas
On this day · 19 December 1843
Dickens wrote his ghost story in six weeks and rushed it into shops on December 19, 1843, days before the holiday.
On December 19, 1843, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol reached London bookshops, timed precisely for the Christmas market. Dickens had written the whole novella in a frantic burst of barely six weeks that autumn, pacing the city’s streets at night as the story took shape.
The rush paid off. The first edition, handsomely bound with hand-colored plates, sold out before Christmas Eve, and by the close of 1844 the book had run through thirteen printings. A tale Dickens had begun partly to settle his own debts instead rescued his reputation and helped fix the modern shape of an English Christmas.
He had the only surviving manuscript bound in crimson leather and gave it to his solicitor as a gift.
The reception was not all profit, mind: lavish production costs and a swift pirated knockoff meant Dickens earned far less than the runaway sales suggested. Still, Scrooge endured, and the ghosts have never quite stopped visiting.
Sources & references
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