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Henry Mayhew, Victorian investigative journalist writes about poverty. 'Mudlarks'

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Henry Mayhew, Victorian investigative journalist writes about poverty. 'Mudlarks'

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A Christmas Carol is not cosy, and its angry message should still haunt us

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Dickens’s novella has become a festive staple but it was intended as a polemic about the treatment of the poor

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Poverty in ACC Essay - Ella Davies grade 9

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Dickens turned in 30,000 words in six weeks, conjuring the narrative while taking 15 to 20-mile walks around London during the depths of night in the autumn of 1843. Still, his publishers, unconvinced by the lacklustre sales of Chuzzlewit, refused to cough up for the book, leading Dickens to pay for the printing himself. He didn't make things easier for anybody by rejecting no fewer than two rounds of endpapers - first a drab olive set, then a jauntier yellow set, which clashed with the title page. The finished book was quite the luxury item: bound in red cloth, pages edged with gilt, it finally completed production two days before publication day on 19 December. Priced at the modern equivalent of £25, it nevertheless captured the hearts of the increasingly Christmas-hungry Victorian middle-class, who snapped up all 6,000 copies by Christmas Eve.

It's difficult to imagine such scenes without typically Dickensian flourishes of Christmas Trees, elaborately wrapped gifts and perhaps a light sprinkling of snow. But the UK was, by contrast, in its infancy of festive frivolity. A Christmas Carol was released in the same year that the Christmas card was invented; the concept of the holiday was about as novel than as 'Black Friday' is in the UK today - and people were giddy about it. Dickens himself threw a festive shindig that year on Boxing Day, in which the author performed magic tricks including turning "ladies' handkerchiefs into candies" and transforming "a box of bran into a guinea pig." Within a year, A Christmas Carol had been reprinted 11 times - two of which before 1843 was out.

The book also cheered the critics, who celebrated "its gentle spirit of humanity" and Dickens' ability "to make the reader laugh and cry, to open his hands, and open his heart to charity even toward the uncharitable". That other arch social commentator, William Makepeace Thackeray, was a fan, describing it as "a personal kindness". A couple of critics, however, were swift to point out the irony of a book about championing the needs of the poor being inaccessible to them, given the opulence of its printing.

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Moral outrage and the need for 'a hit': the real story of why Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol

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Dickens turned in 30,000 words in six weeks, conjuring the narrative while taking 15 to 20-mile walks around London during the depths of night in the autumn of 1843. Still, his publishers, unconvinced by the lacklustre sales of Chuzzlewit, refused to cough up for the book, leading Dickens to pay for the printing himself.

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If you are aiming at an 8/9 listen to these 3 university lecturers discuss ACC. Broadcast today on Radio 4

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If you are aiming at an 8/9 listen to these 3 university lecturers discuss ACC. Broadcast today on Radio 4

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In Our Time - A Christmas Carol - BBC Sounds

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Catch up on your favourite BBC radio show from your favourite DJ right here, whenever you like. Listen without limits with BBC Sounds.

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Grade 9 essay on the importance of the ghosts

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Grade 9 essay on the importance of the ghosts

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An Essay plan on Poverty using Ignorance & Want

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An Essay plan on Poverty using Ignorance & Want

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Answer sheets on Family & Poverty in ACC

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Answer sheets on Family & Poverty in ACC

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Planning an essay on poverty in the novella

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Planning an essay on poverty in the novella

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Ignorance and Want in 'A Christmas Carol'

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The origins of A Christmas Carol BBC article

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The origins of A Christmas Carol BBC article

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The Ghost of Christmas Present: From Dionysus to to Thomas Malthus

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Henry Mayhew, Victorian investigative journalist writes about poverty. 'Mudlarks'

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Henry Mayhew, Victorian investigative journalist writes about poverty. 'Mudlarks'

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A Christmas Carol Non-fiction for context

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More Context points on ACC- The sheet you were given

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More Context points on ACC- The sheet you were given

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Why Victorians love ghost stories
Why Victorians love ghost stories 
Ghost stories: why the Victorians were so spookily good at them | Horror books | The Guardian
📎 Sarah Gilbert (sgilberthome)
📎 Document
Christmas carol
Christmas carol
📎 Photo
I met her in 2011, she wa
I met her in 2011, she was giving a talk on forgiveness and how she w

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Ghost stories: why the Victorians were so spookily good at them | Horror books | The Guardian

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url up by the fire and I'll tell you a ghost story. Don't be alarmed by the creak of the floorboards, the murmurs in the basement, the shrill ululations of a distant dog. Try not to be perturbed by the flickering candle, the fleeting shadows, the horned, hairy hand that appears at your elbow. Something moved? There's a face in the brickwork? A murderer, long ago, was buried in the cellar? Stay calm. Breathe deeply. The ghosts of Christmases past are gathering.

It was the Victorian era, of course, when ghosts proliferated most obviously in fiction - as well as on stage, in photographs and in drawing room seances. Before the start of Victoria's reign in 1837, the health of the genre was thought to be failing. But by 1887, when Mary Louise Molesworth wrote The Story of the Rippling Train, her character Mrs Snowdon was bemoaning ghosts' prevalence. "One hears nothing else nowadays," she said, and in the pages that followed, she would hear yet another, about the phantom of a beautiful woman who had appeared after being terribly burnt in a fire.

What had raised all these apparitions from the dead? The most straightforward explanation is the rise of the periodical press, says Ruth Robbins, professor of English literature at Leeds Metropolitan University. Ghost stories had traditionally been an oral form, but publishers suddenly needed a mass of content, and ghost stories fitted the bill - short, cheap, generic, repetitive, able to be cut quite easily to length.
Reading on mobile? Watch Ruth Robbins discussing Victorian ghost stories
Ever one to spot a commercial opportunity, she says, Charles Dickens produced his own highly successful ghost story, A Christmas Carol, in serial form just before Christmas 1843. This was the same year the first commercially produced Christmas card was sent, and Dickens's story both reflected and influenced a growing trend for marking Christmas with secular celebrations. Dr Andrew Smith, author of The Ghost Story 1840-1920, says: "People like Dickens wanted to revive some notion of community invested within that idea of Christmas. What's interesting about his version of Christmas is that it's not particularly Christian. It's about the family, helping the poor, a moment where you might pause and reflect on your life." It's about Ebenezer Scrooge realising, through the counsel of ghosts, that he must embrace his family, look after his good-natured clerk, and become the embodiment of generosity.

Christmas has long been associated with ghosts, says Roger Clarke, author of A Natural History of Ghosts: 500 Years of Hunting for Proof. Just before Christmas 1642, for instance, shepherds were said to have seen ghostly civil war soldiers battling in the skies. This connection continued in the Victorian era through Dickens's story, and through the ghost stories he later published at Christmas in his periodical All the Year Round, with contributors including Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Gaskell. It would also continue in the tradition started by MR James, the provost of King's College, Cambridge, who would invite a select few students and friends to his rooms each year on Christmas Eve, where he'd read one of the ghost stories he had written, which are still popular today. They include Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book (1895), in which an ancient holy book brings forth a demonic presence, first announced by a hand covered in "coarse black hairs, longer than ever grew on a human hand; nails rising from the ends of the fingers and curving sharply down and forward, grey, horny and wrinkled".

The popularity of ghost stories was strongly related to economic changes. The industrial revolution had led people to migrate from rural villages into towns and cities, and created a new middle class. They moved into houses that often had servants, says Clarke, many taken on around October or November, when the nights were drawing in early - and new staff found themselves "in a completely foreign house, seeing things everywhere, jumping at every creak". Robbins says servants were "expected to be seen and not heard - actually, probably not even seen, to be honest. If you go to a stately home like Harewood House, you see the concealed doorways and servant's corridors. You would actually have people popping in and out without you really knowing they were there, which could be quite a freaky experience. You've got these ghostly figures who actually inhabit the house."

Lighting was often provided by gas lamps, which have also been implicated in the rise of the ghost story; the carbon monoxide they emitted could provoke hallucinations. And there was a preponderance of people encountering ghosts in their daily life come the middle of the century. In 1848, the young Fox sisters of New York heard a series of tappings, a spirit apparently communicating with them through code, and their story spread quickly. The vogue for spiritualism was under way. Spiritualists believed spirits residing in the afterlife were potentially able to commune with the living, and they set up seances to enable this.

Peter Lamont, author of Extraordinary Beliefs, says these gatherings started off quite simply, "and the phenomenon gets more and more impressive. There are floating tables, floating musical instruments, and at some point you get full-form materialisation of ghosts, dressed in white. Occasionally, the [apparition] would get grabbed at a seance and it was discovered that it was actually the medium."

This interest in the supernatural might seem at odds with the growing body of scientific and technological knowledge, but many argue they were intimately connected. In the 19th century, people were increasingly able to communicate at a distance, in disembodied fashion. The telegraph allowed messages to be tapped out in code over long distances - not so unlike the Fox sisters' purported ghost - and the ability to communicate first with other cities, then countries, eventually to transmit messages across the Atlantic, was brilliant and alarming. "If you can have people communicating from 3,000 miles away," says Robbins, "words coming across the ocean, tapped out in Morse code, it may actually be quite a small leap of the imagination to say, 'There's a dead person who I used to know quite well who is talking to me through Morse code.'"

An 1860s picture of a woman getting a scare from an 'apparition'. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

The growth of photography brought the advent of spirit photography - there were people who charged enormous fees, and used various tricks, to picture sitters with ghostly images of dead loved ones. William Mumler, for instance, who created a famous image of Mary Todd Lincoln with the ghostly hands of her dead husband, Abraham Lincoln, resting on her shoulders. Then came film and radio. Ghostly disembodied voices and images poured out of the screen and over the airwaves.

There were ghosts in the ether, under the bed, and more and more, in people's heads. "Throughout the 19th century," says Smith, "there is a progressive internalisation of horror, the idea that the monsters are not out there, but to be found within. That obviously culminates with Freud. With the ghost story there's a sense that instead of being able to lock yourself away in your home, to leave the monster outside, the monster lives with you, and has a kind of intimacy."

Merry Christmas - and sleep soundly.
What's your favourite ghost story? Let us know below

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Ghost stories: why the Victorians were so spookily good at them

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Christmas Eve was traditionally the time to tell scary stories round the hearth. And 19th-century writers proved fearsomely adept, writes Kira Cochrane

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Quotation grid of key quotes on family in ACC

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Quotation grid of key quotes on family in ACC

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Grade 9 essay on Christmas in ACC. Astonishing vocabulary.

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Grade 9 essay on Christmas in ACC. Astonishing vocabulary.

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Debatable points & Vocabulary to use.

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Teacher essay on Childhood in ACC. I & W extract. 

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Teacher essay on Childhood in ACC. I & W extract. 

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Look up the complex vocabulary used.

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Grade 9 essay on Poverty in ACC with planning task

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Grade 9 essay on Poverty in ACC with planning task

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Tess has done some brilliantly detailed work on Poverty & family. Please have a look.

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Extract Booklet on Poverty and the Victorian Family in ACC

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Extract Booklet on Poverty and the Victorian Family in ACC

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Student essay to improve on Family in ACC

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Student essay to improve on Family in ACC

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Grade 9 essay on the Supernatural with planning task.

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Grade 9 essay on the Supernatural with planning task.

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 Grade 9 essay on Scrooge's Charity in ACC

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 Grade 9 essay on Scrooge's Charity in ACC

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Planning task included.

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Extracts on different  types of Christmas in ACC

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Extracts on different  types of Christmas in ACC

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Quote Pictures for different types of Christmas

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Quote Pictures for different types of Christmas

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Mr Bruff Exemplar Essay ACC and the Supernatural

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Mr Bruff Exemplar Essay ACC and the Supernatural

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Student Exemplar: 'A Christmas Carol' & the Theme of the Supernatural

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The Character of Scrooge & past essay questions

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The Character of Scrooge & past essay questions

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Mr Bruff Top Set ACC. Cratchet Christmas & Context

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Mr Bruff Top Set ACC. Cratchet Christmas & Context

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Charles Dickens' 'A Christmas Carol': Top Set Analysis

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Structure Strips for Writing about the role of children in ACC

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Structure Strips for Writing about the role of children in ACC

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Listen & make a mind map.

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Tiny Tim's 'God bless us, every one!' is the rousing conclusion to Charles Dickens' festive fable A Christmas Carol. But what is the Christian message behind this enduring story?

Tiny Tim's "God Bless Us, Every One!" is the rousing conclusion to Charles Dickens' festive fable A Christmas Carol. But what is the Christian message behind this enduring story? Joining Ernie to discuss Charles Dickens' faith and the religious themes in his work are three fans, all of whom have written books about him: actor Simon Callow, author Claire Tomalin and John Bowen - Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of York. Also interviewed is Rev Cheryl Kincaid, an American Presbyterian minister author of "Hearing the Gospel through A Christmas Carol". She has a deep affection for Dickens and the plight of Tiny Tim in particular.

Producer: Helen Lee.

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BBC Radio 4 - Beyond Belief, Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol

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Ernie Rea takes a look at the Christian message behind Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.

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Listen & make a mind map.

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Melvyn Bragg discusses the achievements of Charles Dickens What is his political and literary legacy to our age?

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the achievements of the 19th century literary giant, Charles Dickens. George Bernard Shaw said of Little Dorrit that it was "more seditious than Das Kapital". We can all think of classic Dickens; the gin palaces, grimy narrow lanes, shoe shine boys sitting in the gutters and the terrible city smog. Silas Wake with his peg leg, young Oliver asking for more. But were these figures fictional agents for the radical change that Bernard Shaw suggests? Or was Dickens a great caricaturist but really a conservative at heart? What kind of person was the man Charles Dickens? And what is his political and literary legacy to our age? With Rosemary Ashton is Professor of English at University College London; Michael Slater is Professor of Victorian Literature at Birkbeck College, University of London and editor of The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens' Journalism; John Bowen, Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Keele.

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The achievements and legacy of the 19th century literary giant Charles Dickens.