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TODAY IN LITERARY HISTORY The Man Who Invented Christmas 


"I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year." Charles Dickens

A bit about Dicken’s A Christmas Carol

Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in six weeks during October and November 1843, and it appeared just in time for Christmas, on 19 December. 

The book’s effect was immediate. Thomas Carlyle, the Scottish historian went straight out and bought himself a turkey after reading A Christmas Carol.

The book has been credited with popularizing the phrase ‘Merry Christmas’, a greeting which, prior to Dickens’s story, was not widely used. The term ‘Scrooge’ has entered the language – and the Oxford English Dictionary – as shorthand for a tight-fisted and miserable person (although whenever we refer to a Christmas-hater as ‘a Scrooge’ we overlook the fact that Dickens’s character comes to embrace the holiday as a time of goodwill and good cheer at the end of the narrative).

‘Bah! Humbug!’ has become a universally recognized catchphrase, although Scrooge only uses it twice in the book. A species of snail, Ba humbugi, has even been named in honour of the character.

Charles Dickens has had a superior impact on the way that we celebrate Christmas today than any other individual.  Christmas, he said, is 'a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely...'

#Dickens #AChristmasCarol #Scrooge

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