His current novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, had lost readers during its serialisation, and the publishers were losing confidence in their star author. His bank account was overdrawn and his publishers, Chapman and Hall, were unsupportive of what they considered a strange idea. He finished the novella on 2 December, but instead of being relieved, he was stressed and panicking about finances. set an artist at work upon it.” The artist was Dickens’s great friend John Leech, who would become famous as one of the leading cartoonists for Punch.ĭickens spent six weeks writing. The first known mention of A Christmas Carol is in a letter to Scottish academic Macvey Napier, on 24 October: “I plunged headlong into a little scheme. (Sadly, unlike his fictional counterpart, Harry Burnett did not survive – despite his uncle’s best efforts to pay doctors to save him.)īy the time Dickens travelled back to London, he knew he needed to write something monumentally important.
It made him think about the realities of what life was like for impoverished disabled children, whose lives were even harder than those of their able-bodied siblings. When Dickens visited them, he was confronted by the difficulties facing his disabled nephew Harry. His older sister, Fanny, lived in Manchester with her husband, Henry Burnett, and their two sons, Harry and Charles. In October 1843, Dickens travelled to Manchester to give a speech in support of the Athenaeum, an educational charity for working men and women. The magic formula for the perfect Christmas film The surprising origins of famous Christmas carols Instead, he wanted to write something that would grab people’s attention, something to strike “a sledgehammer blow” on behalf of poor children and have “twenty thousand times the force” of a government pamphlet.
The more he thought about it, however, the less impact he felt it would have. He was “stricken down” by reading the 1843 parliamentary report on Britain’s child labourers, written by pioneering doctor Thomas Southwood Smith and intended to write a pamphlet titled An Appeal to the People of England, on Behalf of the Poor Man’s Child, “with my name attached, of course”. The author was burning with desire to bring about genuine changes to society.
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