Charles Dickens's Christmas Carol, Being a Short Story of Christmas, and a Viewing of The Man Who Invented Christmas
Compelled by personal financial difficulties, Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in only six weeks, during a period of intense creativity in fall 1843. The original manuscript of A Christmas Carol reveals Dickens's method of composition, allowing us to see the author at work. The pace of writing and revision, apparently contiguous, is urgent, rapid, and boldly confident. Deleted text is struck out with a cursive and continuous looping movement of the pen and replaced with more active verbs — to achieve greater vividness or immediacy of effect — and fewer words for concision. This heavily revised sixty-six-page draft — the only manuscript of the story — was sent to the printer in order for the book to be published on 19 December, just in time for the Christmas market.
When the manuscript of A Christmas Carol was returned by the printer, Dickens sent it to a bookbinder (possibly Thomas Robert Eeles of Cursitor Street, London), who bound it in crimson morocco, a handsome, durable goatskin leather. The binding is elegantly decorated in gilt, and the name "Thomas Mitton Esqre" is stamped in gilt on the front cover. Dickens presented the bound manuscript to Mitton, his close friend and creditor, possibly as a Christmas gift, and most probably in gratitude for the generous loan of £270 in the preceding six months.
Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
A Christmas carol in prose: being a ghost story of Christmas
Autograph manuscript signed, December 1843
Purchased by Pierpont Morgan before 1900
MA 97
Every holiday season, the Morgan displays Charles Dickens's original manuscript of A Christmas Carol in Pierpont Morgan's historic library. Dickens wrote his iconic tale in a six-week flurry of activity beginning in October 1843 and ending in time for Christmas publication. He had the manuscript bound in red morocco as a gift for his solicitor, Thomas Mitton. The manuscript then passed through several owners before Pierpont Morgan acquired it in the 1890s.
This year the manuscript of A Christmas Carol is open to Dickens’s unforgettable character sketch of one of literature’s great villain-heroes, Ebenezer Scrooge — the “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner” who spent one crazy night with four ghosts and emerged transformed into “as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world.”
Explore Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol online and view other related highlights from the collection.
Share in the festivities with your own copy of A Christmas Carol available from the Morgan Shop. This is the first-ever trade edition of Charles Dickens's "own and only" manuscript of his classic and beloved story. It contains a facsimile of the original manuscript of A Christmas Carol, published in full-color, with a foreword by Colm Tóibín and introduction by Declan Kiely.
Charles Dickens (1812-1870), A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas, illustration by John Leech, London: Chapman & Hall, 1843. Bequest of Gordon N. Ray, 1987. PML 132030.
Editor's Note: The Morgan is a beautiful small museum, well worth your visit. And Amazon Prime's presentation of The Man Who Invented Christmas is a marvelous retelling of A Christmas Carol from the author's viewpoint.
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