Thirteen more editions had been released by the end of 1844 and it has never been out of print, it has been translated into a number of languages, and has spanned into many adaptations for the theatre, film and TV.
It was Dickens 4th Christmas story and he would go onto to write four more but it was the Christmas Carol that was his most successful, so much so that in 1849 he began public readings of the story, which proved so successful that he undertook another 127 performances until the year of his death in 1870.
The story was published at a time when Christmas was becoming popular again, with a renewed interest in carols and people looking back to the glory days when those living in the countryside celebrated for twelve days, something that didn’t happen in the city, after all money could be made just as easily on Christmas Day as it could any other day, Scrooge is never given a job title because he is meant to represent people who work in the city.
Dickens himself said in 1836 that ‘People will tell you that Christmas is not to them what it used to be’.
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