The Guide
How Dickens cornered the market in promoting festive goodwill
A Christmas Carol has spawned numerous theatrical productions, ballets, operas and over a hundred movies, including one featuring zombies. People just can’t get enough of its core message – drop the humbug and be nicer
Since its publication in 1843, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol has become a quintessential expression of the season as a “kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time” and the only time of the year when “men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely”.
Although his contemporaries were not convinced (Mark Twain called A Christmas Carol a heartless “glittering frostwork”), the transformation of its covetous hero Ebenezer Scrooge from “a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, ...
