A Christmas Carol went on sale on 19 December 1843. The first run of six thousand copies was gone by Christmas Eve. It’s 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. This story stays with me every December, and the ghosts have nothing to do with it. Dickens did what I’d want any author to do: he cared about his readers and made them a beautiful book. The market punished him for it, and every self-publisher who’s ever ordered the nicer paper stock should hear how that went.
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’d read earlier that year. It had shocked him. He 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.
Did A Christmas Carol make Dickens any 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 isn’t a combination that works, and he arranged both deliberately. Under the agreement he’d 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.
I can’t bring myself to call it a mistake.
He wanted poor readers holding a lovely object, and that’s a generous instinct I respect. The notion, still floating around, that quality and a low price will somehow pay for each other is wishful thinking. They won’t, and he found that out at the printer’s.
What happened with Dickens’ A Christmas Carol 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. That meant no damages were recoverable and Dickens was left carrying his own legal costs. He’d spent around seven hundred pounds to win. That 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 didn’t litigate piracy again despite it continuing for the rest of his life. The lesson is uncomfortable and still current: being right about your rights doesn’t enforce them, and enforcing them costs money that being right doesn’t supply. This part makes me angry as hell on his behalf. He proved in court that the thieves had robbed him, and they still walked away by declaring bankruptcy while he paid the bill. Nothing about that trick has gone out of date, and I think it’s the most useful warning on this page for any writer thinking about a lawsuit.
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’s the detail most accounts skip. He didn’t 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 couldn’t 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 aren’t what produced it. That’s the detail I’d pin above every writer’s desk. People wait for a clear month and a quiet house, and Dickens wrote his most loved book between installments of another one while the bills kept arriving. I find that more encouraging than any productivity system I’ve come across.
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’s an unusually clean shape and it’s 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.
I think the first stave is the best-built opening in any Christmas story. Every small cruelty in it comes back, and when it returns turned inside out the payoff feels earned. Most redemption stories skip the planting and then wonder why the ending feels cheap.
What did A Christmas Carol change about Christmas?
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 an 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. That’s the version that’s 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’d calculated.
How did Dickens finally make money from A Christmas Carol?
By reading it aloud. That 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.
The book was the property he couldn’t protect and could barely monetize. The performance of the book was scarce, unpirateable and repeatable, and the income came from performing it.
That’s close to the modern position for most authors, and it was true in 1853.
Why are there so many adaptations of A Christmas Carol?
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’s also free to use, and has been for a very long time. That removes the largest obstacle to any adaptation.
The versions that work commit to the darkness instead of smoothing it. The man has to be unpleasant and frightened for the ending to mean anything, and the adaptations that soften him produce a redemption nobody has to believe.
The soft versions make me grumpy. A Scrooge who’s lovable from the first scene has nothing to be saved from, and the whole machine Dickens built runs on the man being cold and frightened. I want the version that scares me every time. I’ve 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 learn from A Christmas Carol?
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.
Don’t 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 can’t be copied. His text was stolen freely and his performance of it couldn’t 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 accomplished what the pamphlet wouldn’t have.
How should you mark December 19?
Read it aloud. That’s 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. I’d hold this book up as proof that a writer can lose money on the best thing he ever made and still come out ahead. Dickens got the arithmetic wrong and the story right, and I’d take that trade over a tidy profit on a book nobody remembers a year later.
For related pages I’ve written about Dickens himself, the twelve days of Christmas, and why It’s a Wonderful Life failed on release. That’s a very similar story about a seasonal work that made no money and became permanent anyway.