What everyone doesn't know, now, is that Dickens' 1843 tale of Ebenezer Scrooge and the ghosts was just the first in a series of annual holiday books.
"The Chimes," "The Cricket on the Hearth," "The Battle of Life," "The Haunted Man," are not much read today. But in their time, some of them were even more popular than "A Christmas Carol."
"All the books were adapted for the stage immediately," said Robert L. Patten, emeritus professor of English at Rice University and author of "Dickens, Death and Christmas" (Oxford University Press, 2023).
"'The Carol' had a number of stagings," Patten said. " 'The Chimes' had more. And a version of 'Cricket on the Hearth' just pulled in thousands and thousands and thousands of people in New York in 1856, and then back in England. 'A Christmas Carol' wasn't popular play until the 20th century."
In our own commercial age, Scrooge and Bob Cratchit are a part of the yearly Christmas onslaught -- along Rudolph, Santa Claus, nutcrackers, and a million gift catalogs. Each December, the Dickens characters come to us in movies, plays, advertisements, and cartoons starring Mr. Magoo and Mickey Mouse.
So it's worth remembering that Charles Dickens wrote the original story with a high sense of purpose -- and not a little anger.
Dickens, then only 31, always sympathized with the poor. His own father had been imprisoned for debt. But in the early 1840s, he had two shattering experiences.
On a south-of-England vacation, he'd toured the Cornish tin mines. There, he saw women and children laboring under shocking conditions. "All considerations of humanity, policy, social virtue and common decency have been left rotting at the pits mouth," he later wrote.
Then, in 1843, he visited the Field Lane Ragged School in London. It was exactly what it sounds like: a children's school for the poorest of the poor. "A vast hopeless nursery of ignorance, misery and vice; a breeding place for the hulks and jails...horrible to contemplate," he recalled.
His first instinct was to write a pamphlet. People should know! The unfeeling rich, who allowed such things, should be forced to look them in the face.
But he decided he could better plead his case with a holiday book. One in which a hard-hearted man would learn, at Christmas, just how the other half lives.
"His heartfelt purpose in life was to make things better for the majority of people," Patten said.
He wrote "A Christmas Carol" in six weeks, in a fit of inspiration. At one point, The Ghost of Christmas Present takes Scrooge to "a place where Miners live, who labour in the bowels of the Earth. But they know me. See!"
"A Christmas Carol" was a hit -- the go-to gift volume of the 1843 holiday season. Christmas ghost stories were, then, a tradition. But Dickens had come up with something new: a ghost story about Christmas. "The 'Carol' sold well and continued to sell well," Patten said.
But Dickens was just beginning.
He'd always loved the holidays. He wrote one of the first descriptions of a Christmas tree. An earlier yuletide tale, featuring an ornery sexton named Gabriel Grub, was almost a dry-run for the story of Scrooge.
But Christmas was not, for Dickens, just about feasting and merrymaking. It was also about humanity. It was about thinking of the lower classes as "fellow passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys."
Christmas, in short, was the ideal time to preach a sermon. And Dickens had more.
His later holiday books -- he determined to do one each year -- would also stress the plight of the poor, and castigate the smug rich people who created their suffering, and then blamed them for it.
Most followed the "Christmas Carol" formula: a miraculous change of heart, brought about through supernatural means. "The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells that Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In," published in 1844, was -- as the title implies -- less a Christmas than a New Year's story.
In some ways, it's even darker than "A Christmas Carol."
"Trotty" Veck, a poor, elderly "ticket porter" -- that is, messenger boy -- has been so browbeaten by his betters, so convinced that the poor are naturally wicked, that he comes to believe it would be irresponsible to let his daughter marry.
"That's a real issue in the Victorian period," Patten said. "There are a lot of economists saying you can't marry unless you have enough money to be able to sustain a family."
In the inevitable ghostly visitation -- he has fallen asleep in a church belfry on New Year's eve, and is shown visions by the spirits of the bells -- Trotty sees his daughter, married too late, sinking into worse and worse poverty, until she is on the brink of drowning herself and her child.
"The Chimes" has a villain -- Alderman Cute -- even more heartless than Scrooge. It has chapters that are headed "First Quarter," "Second Quarter," "Third Quarter" and "Fourth Quarter" ("A Christmas Carol," with its musical title, had chapters called "staves.")
It also has an impassioned plea for the poor that outdoes anything in the Cratchits' playbook.
"Your laws are made to trap and hunt us," says one character, Will Fern -- a victim of what we would now call the "Carceral State."
"I cuts a stick. To jail with him! I eats a rotten apple or a turnip. To jail with him! ...Anybody -- finds me anywhere, a-doing anything. To jail with him, for he's a vagrant, and a jail-bird known; and jail's the only home he's got."
"Those were actually laws that magistrates were supposed to follow, about trespassing and all the rest," Patten said. "There was a lot of worry about vagrancy."
Pathos, a potent weapon in Dickens' best moments, could turn to bathos in his worst. "The Cricket on the Hearth," his 1845 Christmas book, was a greater success than "A Christmas Carol" at the time, went through two editions, and had numerous stage and even opera adaptations during the 19th century.
It has not worn well.
"'The Chimes,' the second one, got mixed reviews, because it wasn't cozy and warm in the same way that 'A Christmas Carol' was," Patten said. "In the third, 'The Cricket,' he was trying to correct that."
"The Cricket on the Hearth" features a disabled child many degrees more treacly than Tiny Tim: little Bertha, who believes her life to be beautiful because -- wait for it -- she's blind! Her father didn't have the heart to tell her how poor they are!
It has a villain, the cruel toymaker Tackleton, who is a dim carbon of Scrooge. It has a supernatural visitation, this time from a cricket -- in Victorian days, a symbol of domestic felicity. This particular cricket helps the hero, John Peerybingle, realize that his wife has been faithful to him all along, after an innocent misunderstanding too implausible to go into. It has chapters called "Chirps."
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin probably had the last word on this story. The Bolshevik leader attended a stage version shortly before his death in 1924. "Middle class sentimentality," he grumbled -- and walked out in the middle of a scene.
For his next Christmas book, "The Battle of Life," 1846, Dickens chose to dispense with the supernatural and tell a straightforward melodrama of two sisters, a seeming elopement, and a romantic misunderstanding. This one was not so popular, so Dickens brought back his ghosts for his final Christmas volume, "The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain: A Fancy for Christmas-Time."
This time, it is a brooding chemistry teacher, Redlaw, who is haunted by a ghostly double who gives him the gift of amnesia: he will be able to forget his past sorrows, and bestow the same gift on those he meets. Needless to say, he learns that some things, however painful, are better remembered.
" 'The Haunted Man' is sort of a rewrite of the 'Carol,' " Patten said. "It's 'A Christmas Carol' through a different lens and upside down."
That book didn't appear until 1848. It's possible that Dickens himself, by this time, was haunted by his yearly obligation to turn out a new Christmas book. At any rate, "The Haunted Man," was the last of them.
After that, Dickens continued to write Christmas-themed stories for his magazines "Household Words" and "All the Year Round." Such titles as "The Holly-Tree" and "The Haunted House" were generally written in collaboration with others, each writer taking a chapter.
But if most of Dickens' Christmas writings, with the exception of "A Christmas Carol," have faded into obscurity, the form he created -- the Christmas ghost story -- has not. One need look no further than "It's a Wonderful Life" to see how others have carried on the tradition.
"I think they changed the way many people thought about Christmas," Patten said. "There's really nothing about Christ's birth in any of these books. They're really about how you should live you life and be a good neighbor and care about others."