Interesting Factoids about Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”
‘A Chrismas Carol’ is a story firmly embedded into the British psyche and traditions surrounding Christmas.
It was originally published as a novella and helped ignite a national passion for festive generosity and more social Christmas traditions. It’s credited with helping to turn the season into a family-centred time of giving and merriment rather than the sombre church-based observation it had before. The book even popularised the phrase ‘Merry Christmas’.
In this article we’ve gathered together some of the more curious, and rather interesting factoids about Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”.
THE FACTOIDS
- Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in six weeks during October and November 1843, and it appeared just in time for Christmas, on 19 December.
- There have been several opera versions
Mister Scrooge (1958–1959)
A Christmas Carol (1978–1979)
The Passion of Scrooge (1998) - There’s been an all-black musical called Comin’ Uptown (1979), and even a 1973 mime adaptation for the BBC starring Marcel Marceau.
- Film Adaptations : In addition to some of the more ‘regular’ re-telling of the story in film, the Muppets, Mickey Mouse, and Mr Magoo have all featured in adaptations of the book.
- ‘A Chrismas Carol’ wasn’t the first Christmas story Dickens wrote. It wasn’t even the first Christmas ghost story Dickens wrote. He’d already written ‘The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton’, featuring miserly Gabriel Grub.
- The term ‘Scrooge’ in the Oxford English Dictionary – as shorthand for a tight-fisted and miserable person
- Dickens’s indulged in a very eccentric diet on days he gave public readings from his work.
In the early 1850s Dickens began a series of exhausting public readings from his work. On days when he gave public readings he had two tablespoons of rum flavoured with fresh cream for breakfast, a pint of champagne for tea and, half an hour before the start of his performance, would drink a raw egg beaten into a tumbler of sherry
