A Christmas Carol went on sale on 19 December 1843. The first run of six thousand copies was gone by Christmas Eve. It has never been out of print in the hundred and eighty years since, has been adapted more times than almost any other English story, and gave the language a word for a certain kind of person.
Dickens made about a tenth of what he expected from it.
The reason is a set of decisions any self-publishing author would recognize immediately, and the aftermath is a legal story that every writer should know before they think about defending their own copyright.
Why did Dickens write A Christmas Carol?
He needed money urgently and he had an argument he wanted to make.
The financial position was worse than his fame suggests. Martin Chuzzlewit was serializing badly, sales were well below his previous books, and his publishers had a clause allowing them to reduce his monthly payments if the numbers stayed low. He had a large household, numerous dependent relatives, an expensive house and a wife expecting another child.
The argument came from a report on child labor in mines and factories that he had read earlier that year. He had been shocked by it, planned to write a political pamphlet in response, and then decided that a story would reach further than a pamphlet ever could.
He wrote the book in about six weeks, walking the streets of London at night while working it out. He described weeping and laughing over it, which for a professional at his level of output is an unusual thing to record.
Why did the book lose money?
Because he published it at his own expense and specified an expensive object.
He wanted it to be a beautiful thing: gilt edges, colored endpapers, four hand-colored etchings, a bound cloth cover. Hand-coloring is expensive at any volume and ruinous at scale. He also insisted on a low retail price, five shillings, so that ordinary readers could afford it.
Expensive to produce and cheap to buy is not a combination that works, and he arranged both deliberately.
Under the agreement he had made, he carried the production costs himself and took the profit after they were covered. On a conventional royalty the six thousand copies would have paid him well. On this arrangement they barely paid the printer.
His expectation had been around a thousand pounds. He received something closer to a couple of hundred.
The pattern is exact and familiar. An author who wants control over the physical object, who chooses quality over margin, and who prices for the reader instead of the business, will sell out a print run and not be able to pay the rent from it.
What happened with the piracy lawsuit?
Within weeks a publisher issued a condensed version of the story under a slightly different title, and Dickens sued.
He won outright. The court found against the pirates, granted an injunction, and there was no ambiguity about who was in the right.
The defendants then declared bankruptcy, which meant no damages were recoverable and Dickens was left carrying his own legal costs. He had spent around seven hundred pounds to win, which was more than the book had earned him.
He wrote afterward that it was better to be robbed than to go to law about it, and he did not litigate piracy again despite it continuing for the rest of his life.
The lesson is uncomfortable and still current. Being right about your rights and being able to enforce them are separate questions, and the second one costs money that the first one does not supply.
What did the six weeks of writing look like?
Fast, intense, and undertaken alongside a novel he was already under contract to deliver monthly.
That is the detail most accounts skip. He did not clear his schedule for this. Martin Chuzzlewit was still serializing, the installments still had to appear, and he wrote the Carol in the gaps around a job he could not put down.
His method was walking. He covered fifteen or twenty miles at a time through London at night, working out scenes on the move and then writing them, which is a habit visible in the book’s structure: each stave is roughly the length of a thought sustained across a long walk.
He also described the effect it had on him in unusually emotional terms for a professional writer with his output, saying that he wept and laughed over it and was reluctant to leave the desk when it was going well.
The practical observation for anyone with a day job is that the most durable thing he ever wrote was produced in the margins of other obligations, at speed, under financial pressure. Ideal conditions are not what produced it.
What are the staves and why does the structure work?
He called the chapters staves, a musical term, because the book is a carol and he wanted the frame stated on every page.
There are five. An establishing one that shows the man as he is and issues the warning, three visitations, and a resolution. That is an unusually clean shape and it is the reason the story adapts to any medium without alteration.
The three-part middle does something specific. Past explains the man, Present indicts him, and Future threatens him, so each visitation applies a different kind of pressure instead of repeating the same one louder. Very few three-act structures distinguish their beats that carefully.
The first stave is also doing more work than it gets credit for. Everything the ending pays off is planted there: the clerk’s coal, the nephew’s invitation, the charity collectors, the refusal that costs nothing at the time.
A writer studying structure could do worse than to read the first and last staves side by side and mark which elements repeat. Almost every one does, and every repetition is inverted.
What did the book change?
More than a book usually can, though less than the popular claim.
The claim that Dickens invented the modern Christmas is an overstatement. The revival of the holiday was already under way, driven by a growing middle class, changing attitudes to family, and specific royal fashions that made the decorated tree respectable.
What the book did was supply the emotional content. It attached the season to charity, to family gathering, to a specific obligation toward people worse off, and it did so in a story that people read aloud to each other within days of publication.
It also moved the holiday’s center of gravity from religious observance toward domestic feeling, which is the version that has traveled worldwide.
And it worked on the original target. Contemporary accounts describe employers behaving differently after reading it, and the book was used directly in arguments about factory conditions. A story reached further than the pamphlet would have, exactly as he had calculated.
How did he make money from it in the end?
By reading it aloud, which turned out to be the real asset.
He began performing the story publicly in the 1850s, first for charity and then commercially, and it became the foundation of a touring career that ran for the rest of his life. He cut his own performance text, rehearsed obsessively, and played all the parts.
The readings earned him more than the book ever did, and by a wide margin. They also very likely killed him: the schedule was punishing, his health collapsed under it, and he continued anyway.
For a working writer the structural point is worth taking seriously. The book was the property that could not be protected and could barely be monetized. The performance of the book was scarce, unpirateable and repeatable, and that is where the income was.
That is close to the modern position for most authors, and it was true in 1853.
Why are there so many adaptations?
Because the structure is close to perfect and the copyright is long gone.
The story is short, has three clean acts built into the visitations, requires a small cast, and contains a complete character arc with a fixed shape. It can be staged in a hall, filmed on a modest budget, animated, performed by puppets, or run as a radio play, and none of those require altering the architecture.
It is also free to use, and has been for a very long time, which removes the largest obstacle to any adaptation.
The versions that work commit to the darkness instead of smoothing it. The man has to be genuinely unpleasant and genuinely frightened for the ending to mean anything, and the adaptations that soften him produce a redemption nobody has to believe.
I have ranked the film versions in the greatest Christmas films, and the seasonal tradition the book sits inside is covered in the Christmas ghost story tradition.
What can a writer take from this?
Four things.
Understand the arithmetic before you choose the object. A beautiful book at a low price is a gift to readers and a loss to you, and Dickens made that choice knowingly. Make it knowingly too.
Do not assume winning is affordable. The piracy case was a total legal victory and a financial disaster, and that outcome is available to anybody who defends a copyright against a party with nothing to take.
Find the thing that cannot be copied. His text was stolen freely and his performance of it could not be, and the performance is what paid.
Write the story instead of the argument. He set out to publish a pamphlet about child labor and produced a ghost story instead, and the ghost story did the work the pamphlet would not have.
How should you mark December 19?
Read it aloud. That is what it was written for and it takes about three hours in full, or ninety minutes in the performance text he cut himself.
If you want it in one sitting, read the first stave and the last back to back. The distance between them is the whole book.
For related pages I have written about Dickens himself, the twelve days of Christmas, and why It’s a Wonderful Life failed on release, which is a strikingly similar story about a seasonal work that made no money and became permanent anyway.