A Christmas Carol

A Christmas Carol was published in London by Chapman and Hall on 19 December 1843, with illustrations by John Leech, and the full title on its first edition was A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas. Charles Dickens wrote it quickly after reading a government report on child labour in the English industrial towns, and he intended it as a piece of advocacy rather than a seasonal entertainment; the treatment of the Cratchit family and of the children revealed by the Ghost of Christmas Present carries the argument.

The book was an immediate success and stayed in print through Dickens's lifetime, read aloud at Christmas gatherings and adapted for the stage while he was still alive. It gave English a set of words that are still used as shorthand, from humbug to Scrooge, and it established the modern idea of the Christmas story as a moral examination rather than a religious text. Dickens wrote four further Christmas books in the following years, though none matched its reception.

The novella has been adapted for the stage, for film, for radio and for animation many times over, and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come has become one of the most familiar silent figures in English fiction. It is short enough to be read in an evening, and its structure of three instructive visits is the template that a great deal of later seasonal writing still follows.

The first printing went quickly and Dickens was reading the story in public within weeks, which is one reason its phrases have been part of the language for longer than most novels have been in print.