• Collected
• Article

How Christmas became a publishing sensation

The great-great-great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens, RLF Fellow Lucinda Hawksley, on some of the books of Christmases past.

Since its publication on 19 December 1843, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens has never been out of print. It was an astonishing and instant success, selling out its first 6,000 copy print run in just five days. With the novella’s success, a new industry was created, and by December 1844, a plethora of seasonal titles had been published. Although A Christmas Carol remains the most famous, Dickens was just one of many 19^th-century authors who wrote and published seasonal tales. Here are some of my favourites:

1. The Nutcracker and the Mouse King by E. T. A. Hoffmann (1816)

The original story is much darker than the ballet it inspired. On Christmas Eve, seven-year-old Marie Stahlbaum’s favourite toy, a Nutcracker in the shape of a solider, comes to life and battles the seven-headed Mouse King and his army of mice.

In 1844, Alexandre Dumas published an adaptation of Hoffmann’s story, in which he made the plot less gothic and removed some of the more unpalatable violent elements from the original. It was Dumas’ gentler version of the story that the Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky used when creating his ballet, The Nutcracker(1892).

2. The Keeping of Christmas at Bracebridge Hall by Washington Irving (1822)

In 1815, American author Washington Irving travelled to Europe, where he stayed for 17 years, mainly living in England and Spain. Irving wrote The Keeping of Christmas at Bracebridge Hall after spending Christmas with his sister, Sarah, and her husband in Birmingham. His story touched on how much Christmas was changing, commenting:“Many of the games and ceremonials of Christmas have entirely disappeared.”

The narrator in Irving’s story is an American travelling around England. On a snowy Christmas Eve, he arrives by stagecoach at a country inn. He feels lonely and sorry for himself but soon encounters a young man, Frank Bracebridge, whom he had previously met while travelling in mainland Europe. Frank invites the narrator to stay with his family and enjoy a proper English Christmas.

3. The Night of Christmas Eve by Nikolai Gogol (1832)

Nikolai Gogol was born in Ukraine at a time when his country was part of the Russian Empire. Before writing his most famous works, Diary of a Madman (1835) and The Government Inspector (1836), Gogol wrote a short story set on Christmas Eve in the Ukrainian village of Dikanka.

That night, a devil steals the moon because he is cross with the village blacksmith, Vakula, for painting an ugly picture of him. Vakula is trying to win the love of Oksana, who has said she will only marry him if he achieves the almost impossible task of bringing her a pair of shoes the Tzarina (the queen) is wearing. Ultimately, Vakula tricks the devil into helping him bring Oksana the shoes she has set her heart on.

The Night of Christmas Eve was published in Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, a collection of short stories by Gogol.

4. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (1843)

According to the newspapers of the 1830s and 40s, there was a general feeling that Christmas had lost its meaning. Journalists complained that the focus was now on feasting and fine clothing and that previously important Christmas traditions, such as giving alms to the poor and helping those in need, had been forgotten.

Britain was then suffering through an economic depression, an era that would become known in history as ‘the Hungry Forties’. Increasing numbers of people were suffering. Against this backdrop, Charles Dickens was inspired to write A Christmas Carol, after reading a report on child poverty. Most people think of Ebenezer Scrooge and the Christmas ghosts as being the main characters, but it is the poor children in the book whom Dickens wanted to bring to the forefront.

As well as Tiny Tim, two crucial characters are Ignorance and Want, the children who appear with the Ghost of Christmas Present. Dickens wrote to a friend that his Christmas story would strike “a sledgehammer blow” on behalf of “the poor man’s child”.

5. The Fir Tree by Hans Christian Andersen (1844)

On 21 December 1844, Danish author Hans Christian Andersen published two seasonal stories, The Fir Tree and The Snow Queen. The first of these is about a pessimistic tree. As it grows from a seed, the little fir tree perpetually yearns to be taller. It is never able to enjoy what it can see from its current height, and when it does become taller, it longs to be cut down so its timbers can be used to build a ship. It is sad when other trees are chosen instead.

When the tree is finally taken to become a Christmas tree, it thinks it will be happy. Only then does it realise, too late, that it was happy in the forest. At the end of the story, the tree is chopped up to make firewood.

6. Christmas Storms and Sunshine by Elizabeth Gaskell (1848)

Elizabeth Gaskell’s short story Christmas Storms and Sunshine is a satirical but warm-hearted tale about warring neighbours. The opening paragraph seems remarkably modern, relating political differences between the newspapers on which the two husbands work: “The Flying Post was long established and respectable – alias bigoted and Tory; the Examiner was spirited and intelligent – alias new-fangled and democratic”. These political differences spill into their personal lives and make the two men dislike each other.

At home, their wives are also feuding: Mrs Hodgson has a baby of which the childless Mrs Jenkins is very jealous, and Mrs Jenkins has a much-loved cat which Mrs Hodgson beats after it steals food.

But when the Hodgson’s baby becomes ill and Mrs Jenkins helps to save his life, everything starts to change. By the end of the story, the couples enjoy Christmas dinner together.

7. The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle by Arthur Conan Doyle (1892)

The name Sherlock Holmes first appeared in 1887 when a young doctor, Arthur Conan Doyle, turned author and published A Study in Scarlet. Holmes’s success was immediate, and Conan Doyle took advantage of the new market in seasonal publishing.

In The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, a man witnesses a fight and tries to help rescue one of the men involved. Instead, he finds himself left alone in possession of a discarded goose and a displaced hat. He takes them home and, while preparing the goose to be cooked, discovers the stolen jewel. After taking his tale to Sherlock Holmes, the detective and Dr Watson set about finding out who the fighting men were and how the jewel ended up inside a Christmas goose.

8. The Christmas Hirelings by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1894)

Mary Elizabeth Braddon has, like many female writers of the time, been largely forgotten, yet she was prolific and very well-known, publishing over 80 novels and short stories. Her popular story, The Christmas Hirelings, told the tale of a lonely old man and his decision to open his manor house to three hireling children for the festive season.

The more the merrier

Many other authors, including Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, included Christmas scenes in their novels – even cookery writers got in on the act. Until the 1860s, the festive cake was a Twelfth Night Cake, lavishly decorated and eaten on 6 January for Twelfth Night. This began to change after 1861 when the cookery writer Mrs Beeton published the first recipe for Christmas Cake in The Book of Household Management.

Charles Dickens’ influence on Christmas

So how did Charles Dickens manage to popularise Christmas? Christmas was always a popular holiday in the young Dickens’ household, a time of parties, music and dancing. These early Georgian Christmases, perhaps absorbed by Dickens through stories related by his parents and grandparents, inspired the Christmas Past episodes in A Christmas Carol.

Not everyone, however, was as keen on the season as the Dickenses. In 1843, when Charles Dickens told his publishers, Chapman and Hall, that he had an idea for a book about Christmas, they felt it was not a commercial enough subject for one of their books. They had so little faith in the idea that they insisted Dickens pay a large percentage of the production costs. In essence, Charles Dickens partially self-published A Christmas Carol. After the novella’s huge success, Dickens moved to a new publisher, Bradbury and Evans.

The market for Christmas stories remains as robust as it was in Dickens’s time. Several authors are contracted to write books specifically for Christmas, as RLF Fellow and The Bookseller’s associate editor, Caroline Sanderson, has written about in her Christmas gift guide for book lovers.

Yet no single author has come to be associated with the season as much as the author of A Christmas Carol. When Dickens died in June 1870, a little girl working in Covent Garden Market was heard to ask, “If Mr Dickens is dead, does that mean Father Christmas will die too?”

This article originally appeared on our Substack channel.

You might also like: