From Page Turner to Crowd Pleaser: Comparing the 1843 Edition of A Christmas Carol to Dickens’s Public Readings
The first edition of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, published in 1843, was a luxury gift book advocating charity and social change to the Victorian middle and upper classes. Dickens exerted extensive authorial control over the book’s bibliographic features. Fifteen years later, Dickens again controlled how the story was received, but this time in the form of public readings. Through performance annotations and literary cuts recorded in his prompt copy, Dickens reached broader audiences, including the lower classes. Rather than comparing print editions, Dickens’s work allows a comparison of different embodiments of the same text. Contrasting the first edition’s material form with Dickens’s performance prompt copy illustrates why Victorian audiences received his work so enthusiastically. It suggests that although Dickens cut most of his social messaging for the stage, his story reached people of all classes and became intrinsic to the Victorian Christmas.
The 1843 publication of A Christmas Carol was well-timed to meet changing Victorian interests and reach people quickly for seasonal consumption in a growing Christmas culture. By the mid-Victorian years innovative publishers produced ‘short fictions packaged as gift books’; these were ‘money makers designed specifically for the Christmas trade’.[1] Dickens took just six weeks to write A Christmas Carol and the manuscript was sent to the printer for publication on 19 December ‘just in time for the Christmas market’.[2]
The visual aesthetics of A Christmas Carol were intended to be consumed alongside text. Dickens, and his publishers, Chapman and Hall, catered to the growing Victorian markets for ‘publishing and the fine arts’ and growing ‘passion for refining the skills of looking’.[3] Furthermore, Christmas was in revival, with 1843 being the year of the first known Christmas card.[4] Davis observes that A Christmas Carol was ‘a new Christmas story’ that ‘melded country customs and Christmas lore with a Londoner’s vision’.[5]
A Christmas Carol suited the increasingly urban Victorian England.[6] However, it was designed only for middle- and upper-class audiences, and conveyed a strong message for the affluent readership advocating generosity and social responsibility; ‘A Christmas Carol was Dickens’s response to the condition of the working class in London.’[7] An 1843 report of the Children’s Employment Commission details how publishers in London utilised low-wage labour, with children working in bookbinding from the age of fourteen.[8] Dickens read and responded to the report; the depiction of working children in A Christmas Carol echoed the report findings.[9] Jaffe argues that A Christmas Carol is the ‘mass marketing of an ideology about sympathy’.[10] A Christmas Carol is a story of change in a ‘potential charity giver’ who ‘has forgotten how to feel’.[11] There was a sense of ‘a text with a social purpose that could do some good in the world’.[12] The edition remained inaccessible to lower classes due to literacy rates and cost. At five shillings the book was priced ‘beyond the reach of most of the nation’s Cratchits, whose cause it championed’.[13] Scrooge’s clerk in A Christmas Carol, Bob Cratchit, earned fifteen shillings per week.[14]
Dickens self-funded the first print run of five thousand copies.[15] The material construction rendered the book ‘not only as a text to be read, but as a material object to be inspected’.[16] McGann’s framework of bibliographical codes can be applied to the text and includes features such as ‘ink, typeface, and paper’ and ‘page layout’.[17] McGann specifically observes that ‘Dickens’s novels were […] works of composite art’.[18] Hancher provides a thorough analysis of bibliographic features of A Christmas Carol and calls special attention to the cover, described varyingly in combinations of brownish, reddish and salmon.[19] The Project Gutenberg website shows a faded brown cloth cover and a blind-debossed floral border. In the centre of the cover is a gilded holly wreath, with ‘A Christmas Carol’ written in gothic script, and ‘by Charles Dickens’ is written in serif capitals.[20] Meanwhile, The British Library image depicts the cover as reddish-brown, and describes it as ‘brown salmon’.[21] However, an 1843 review states ‘the covers are of crimson cotton’.[22] Hancher therefore posits that the book was ‘presumably an unstable and fugitive crimson…but originally, at least, a bright red for Christmas.’[23] The uncertainty over the cover colour highlights the instability of material texts over time, and the challenges of perceiving the text as it was originally received. Nevertheless, crimson, with gold trimmings, was the ideal luxury visual aesthetic for growing seasonal consumption and gift culture.
Dickens took advantage of the developing technology for printing illustrations: namely wood engravings, which had their greatest impact in the 1840s.[24] John Leech provided eight illustrations: four wood engravings which were printed alongside the text, and four coloured plates which were printed separately; all were carefully placed to enhance the reader’s experience.[25] For example, the reader shares Scrooge’s startlement when they ‘turn the page and confront the image of Marley’s ghost’.[26] The hand-painting of the colour images was outsourced but ‘accounted for a disproportionately high proportion of the total expense’.[27] The illustrations in the first print-run ‘precipitated a crisis’ for Dickens: he earned only £230 instead of the expected £1000.[28] Dickens suppressed this outcome ‘in order to not tarnish the success of his book’.[29]
In the following years A Christmas Carol transitioned from ‘text to culture-text’, which Dickens largely welcomed as a path to ‘awaken social concern’.[30] However, he was particularly ‘upset by some of the theatrical adaptations and felt that A Christmas Carol was treated like ‘literary public property’, so he attempted to reassert his authority through public readings.[31] Dickens first read A Christmas Carol publicly, in Birmingham in 1853, raising funds for the Birmingham and Midland Institute.[32] Dickens insisted on as many free admissions as possible for the working class.[33] His passage about the poverty-stricken children Ignorance and Want was especially well-received by this audience.[34] Through public readings Dickens saw a ‘chance to reach the large nonreading audience’.[35] In the following years he ‘gave another dozen or so…always of the Carol and generally around Christmas’.[36] In 1857 Dickens gave serious consideration to undertaking paid readings. He wrote to his friend John Forster seeking advice regarding paying for a recent house purchase ‘by reviving that idea of some Readings from my books?’.[37]
To turn A Christmas Carol from a novel to be read at home, into a lively spectacle for the stage required cuts and a new format. McGann argues that distinguishing between linguistic and bibliographical codes offers a useful framework for understanding textual production.[38] This process is exemplified in the transition of A Christmas Carol into the prompt copy; while Dickens adapted the material form to aid performance, literary changes were relatively small. Between the first public reading in 1853 and the first paid season in 1858, Dickens reduced the length from three hours to two hours, with intervals.[39] Dickens created a prompt copy of the book for his public readings by sending a copy of A Christmas Carol to bookbinders, for the pages to be re-laid into larger sheets.[40] This custom-bound copy enabled Dickens to exercise close control over audience reception. It provided space for his various ‘cuts, emendations, and notes’, which included cancelled sections and ‘reminders about tone’.[41] In sharp contrast to the narrator’s intimate relationship with the reader in the text of A Christmas Carol, Dickens significantly reduced and depersonalised the narrator’s voice in his prompt copy. Having distanced himself from the ‘authorial narrator’ role, Dickens’ dramatic physical and vocal performance of his characters gave them life and centrality.[42] Collins notes that alterations were made for ‘simplicity or euphony’.[43] Dickens also underlined words that required emphasis or vocal effects and added stage directions for voice tones or gestures.[44] However, Dickens altered not just the presentation and delivery, but also the ideological function of the text. Collins argues that Dickens was sometimes willing to sacrifice morals to uphold his ‘artistic manifestos […] “to increase the stock of harmless cheerfulness”’.[45] In order not to alienate parts of his audience, Dickens eventually cut from his readings ‘nearly all the socially critical passages’, including omitting Scrooge’s previously popular encounter with Ignorance and Want.[46] Although Dickens removed Ignorance and Want from his performances, he did not remove them from the prompt copy entirely.[47] Perhaps this reflected his personal views on poverty. Collectively these alterations changed the textual condition of A Christmas Carol from a private visual experience to a shared public one, demonstrating that textual condition encompasses both print and performance.
Just as the festive book both capitalised on and contributed to Victorian consumer patterns at Christmas, Dickens’s readings both reflected and reinforced Christmas spirit. Smith observes that the ‘wintery timing’ of Dickens’s readings to his American audiences ‘amplified the significance’.[48] This suggests a connection between A Christmas Carol and Dickens’s transatlantic exportation of Victorian Christmas ideals. Considering comments from reviewers and Dickens’s friends alike, Collins concludes that ‘Dickens was not trading on his name and popularity, but as a performer was very talented’.[49] Dickens tightly controlled every aspect of the performances. He took his own gas stage lighting on tours, which he paired with dark drapes behind him.[50] Dickens carried his prompt book on stage, despite performing from memory.[51] Dickens spent ‘hundreds of hours perfecting the readings’ so the book constituted part of a simple set of props which added to an illusion of effortless reading.[52] Davis identifies the readings ‘were performances, high points in the history of Victorian theatre’, and what Dickens cut in narrative he conveyed in ‘gesture, facial expression, and tone of voice’. Kate Field, who attended twenty-five of Dickens’s American public readings, wrote, ‘what Dickens does is frequently infinitely better than anything he says… it is pantomime worthy of the finest actor’.[53]
Dickens read A Christmas Carol publicly 127 times, including at his final public reading.[54] He kept his readings accessible to a broad spectrum of the public throughout. While his ticket price peaked at seven shillings on his farewell tour, he kept some seats at ‘one shilling, for his poorer admirers’.[55] Forster attended and recalled that Dickens told his audience: ‘I vanish now for evermore, with a heartfelt, grateful, respectful, affectionate farewell’.[56]
The luxurious bibliographic codes in the 1843 first edition appealed to affluent readers and championed the poor through political messaging. Dickens reshaped the material form of A Christmas Carol to reshape his audience. His reduction of overt social commentary in the prompt copy extended its social appeal. Through charity readings and cheap seats at paid performances Dickens was able to include working-class spectators. Dickens used his authorial voice and authority beyond the text, to promote charity and social progression, and as a performer he united divided Victorian classes. Dickens changed not only the material form of the text, but also its social function.
Bibliography
Altick, Richard D., ‘Publishing’, in A New Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture, ed. by Herbert F. Tucker (John Wiley & Sons, 2014), pp. 289–304
‘A Christmas Carol’, Morning Post, 26 December 1843, p. 3 <https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0000174/18431226/016/0003> [accessed 17 July 2026]
Cohen, Jane R., Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators (Ohio State University Press, 1980)
Collins, Philip, ‘Dickens’s Public Readings: Texts and Performances’, Dickens Studies Annual, 3 (1974), 182–244 <https://www.jstor.org/stable/44372322> [accessed 18 July 2026]
Curtis, Gerard, ‘The art of seeing: Dickens in the visual market’, in Visual Words: Art and the Material Book in Victorian England (Ashgate, 2002), pp. 103–41
Davis, Paul, The Lives and Times of Ebenezer Scrooge (Yale University Press, 1990)
Dickens, Charles, A Christmas Carol in Prose; Being a Ghost Story of Christmas (Chapman & Hall, 1843), [front cover], digitised in John Sunderland, ‘The Origins of “A Christmas Carol”’, British Library, n.d. <https://www.britishlibrary.cn/en/articles/the-origins-of-a-christmas-carol/> [accessed 17 July 2026]
——, A Christmas Carol in Prose; Being a Ghost Story of Christmas (Chapman & Hall, 1843; facsimile repr. Charles Dickens Museum, 2025)
——, A Christmas Carol in Prose; Being a Ghost Story of Christmas (Chapman & Hall, 1843), front cover, digitised in Project Gutenberg, eBook no. 46, 2004 <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/46> [accessed 16 July 2026]
——, A Christmas Carol, in Prose: Being a Ghost Story of Christmas [Author’s personal prompt copy], Bradbury and Evans, 1843 (12th edn, annotated c. 1849–1859), New York Public Library, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, <https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/e1951b10-d507-0136-fa03-60f81dd2b63c> [accessed 18 July 2026]
——, The Public Readings, ed. by Philip Collins (Clarendon Press, 1975)
Eliot, Simon, ‘From Few and Expensive to Many and Cheap: The British Book Market 1800–90’, in A Companion to the History of the Book, ed. by Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose (John Wiley & Sons, 2019), pp. 291–302
Ferguson, Susan L., ‘Dickens’s Public Readings and the Victorian Author’, SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 41:4 (2001), 729–49, doi:10.1353/sel.2001.0037
Field, Kate, Pen Photographs of Charles Dickens’s Readings: Taken from Life (Osgood, 1871)
Forster, John, The Life of Charles Dickens, 3 vols, III: 1852–1870 (Chapman and Hall, 1874)
Hancher, Michael, ‘Reading the Visual Text: “A Christmas Carol”’, The Yale University Library Gazette, 74.1–2 (1999), pp. 21–40
House of Commons, Children’s Employment Commission: Second Report of the Commissioners (Trades and Manufactures), Command no. 431, XIV (W. Clowes and Sons for HMSO, 1843), eBook, HathiTrust <https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.li53bx> [accessed 19 July 2026]
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[1] Richard D. Altick, ‘Publishing’, in A New Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture, ed. by Herbert F. Tucker (John Wiley & Sons, 2014), pp. 289–304 (p. 291).
[2] ‘Charles Dickens’s Christmas Carol’, The Morgan Library & Museum, n.d. <https://www.themorgan.org/collections/works/dickens/ChristmasCarol> [accessed 15 July 2026].
[3] Gerard Curtis, ‘The art of seeing: Dickens in the visual market’, in Visual Words: Art and the Material Book in Victorian England (Ashgate, 2002), pp. 103–41 (p. 103).
[4] Paul Davis, The Lives and Times of Ebenezer Scrooge (Yale University Press, 1990), p. 21.
[5] Ibid., p. 25.
[6] Ibid., p. 25.
[7] Claire Tomalin, Charles Dickens: A Life (Penguin, 2012), p. 94.
[8] House of Commons, Children’s Employment Commission: Second Report of the Commissioners (Trades and Manufactures), Command no. 431, XIV (W. Clowes and Sons for HMSO, 1843), eBook, HathiTrust, p. 134 <https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.li53bx> [accessed 19 July 2026].
[9] Davis, The Lives and Times of Ebenezer Scrooge, pp. 13, 43.
[10] Audrey Jaffe, ‘Spectacular Sympathy: Visuality and Ideology in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol’, PMLA, 109.2 (1994), pp. 254–65 (p. 256). <https://www.jstor.org/stable/463120> [accessed 16 July 2026]
[11] Ibid., p. 256.
[12] Thomas Ruys Smith, ‘A Christmas Carol in Nineteenth-Century America, 1844–1870’, Comparative American Studies: An International Journal, 20.3–4 (2023), pp. 209–224 (p. 214), doi:10.1080/14775700.2023.2229214.
[13] Michael Slater, Charles Dickens (Yale University Press, 2009), p. 220.
[14] Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol in Prose; Being a Ghost Story of Christmas (Chapman & Hall, 1843; facsimile repr.: Charles Dickens Museum, 2025), p. 11.
[15] John Sunderland, ‘The Origins of “A Christmas Carol”’, British Library, n.d. <https://www.britishlibrary.cn/en/articles/the-origins-of-a-christmas-carol/> [accessed 17 July 2026]
[16] Michael Hancher, ‘Reading the Visual Text: “A Christmas Carol”’, The Yale University Library Gazette, 74.1–2 (1999), pp. 21–40 (p. 21).
[17] Jerome McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 71, 77.
[18] Ibid., p. 70.
[19] Hancher, ‘Reading the Visual Text’, p. 28.
[20] Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol in Prose; Being a Ghost Story of Christmas (Chapman & Hall, 1843), front cover, digitised in Project Gutenberg, eBook no. 46, 2004 <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/46> [accessed 16 July 2026].
[21] Sunderland, ‘The Origins of “A Christmas Carol”’.
[22] ‘A Christmas Carol’, Morning Post, 26 December 1843, p. 3 <https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0000174/18431226/016/0003> [accessed 17 July 2026].
[23] Hancher, ‘Reading the Visual Text’, p. 29.
[24] Simon Eliot, ‘From Few and Expensive to Many and Cheap: The British Book Market 1800–90’, in A Companion to the History of the Book, ed. by Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose (John Wiley & Sons, 2019), pp. 291–302 (p. 292).
[25] Hancher, ‘Reading the Visual Text’, p. 30.
[26] Ibid., p. 25.
[27] Jane R. Cohen, Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators (Ohio State University Press, 1980), p. 143.
[28] Ibid., p. 143.
[29] Tomalin, Charles Dickens: A Life, p. 95.
[30] Davis, The Lives and Times of Ebenezer Scrooge, p. 5.
[31] Ibid., p. 5.
[32] Carolyn Vega, ‘Charles Dickens’s Reading Copies’, The Missouri Review, 42.2 (2019), 39–47 (p. 41) https://doi.org/10.1353/mis.2019.0017
[33] Kate Field, Pen Photographs of Charles Dickens’s Readings: Taken from Life (Osgood, 1871), p. 25.
[34] Philip Collins, ‘Dickens’s Public Readings: Texts and Performances’, Dickens Studies Annual, 3 (1974), pp. 182–244 (p. 192).
[35] Davis, The Lives and Times of Ebenezer Scrooge, p. 53.
[36] Collins, ‘Dickens’s Public Readings’, p. 192.
[37] John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, 3 vols, III: 1852–1870 (Chapman and Hall, 1874), p. 165.
[38] McGann, The Textual Condition, p. 22.
[39] Charles Dickens, The Public Readings, ed. by Philip Collins (Clarendon Press, 1975), p. xxx.
[40] Vega, ‘Charles Dickens’s Reading Copies’, p. 42.
[41] Ibid., p. 43.
[42] Susan L. Ferguson, ‘Dickens’s Public Readings and the Victorian Author’, SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 41.4 (2001), pp. 729–49 (p. 737), doi:10.1353/sel.2001.0037.
[43] Dickens, The Public Readings, p. xxx.
[44] Ibid., p. xxx.
[45] Collins, ‘Dickens’s Public Readings’, p. 182.
[46] Ibid., p. 192.
[47] Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, in Prose: Being a Ghost Story of Christmas [Author’s personal prompt copy], Bradbury and Evans, 1843 (12th edn, annotated c. 1849–1859), p. 119, New York Public Library, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, <https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/e1951b10-d507-0136-fa03-60f81dd2b63c> [accessed 18 July 2026].
[48] Smith, ‘A Christmas Carol in Nineteenth-Century America’, p. 212.
[49] Collins, ‘Dickens’s Public Readings’, p. 193.
[50] Ibid., p. 193.
[51] Vega, ‘Charles Dickens’s Reading Copies’, p. 46.
[52] Ferguson, ‘Dickens’s Public Readings and the Victorian Author’, p. 734.
[53] Field, Pen Photographs of Charles Dickens’s Readings, p. 33.
[54] Dickens, The Public Readings, p. xxvii.
[55] Ibid., p. xxviii.
[56] Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, p. 493.