The Silent Reception of Charles Dickens’s ‘A Christmas Carol’ in America, 1844 onward
By Dan Calinescu, Toronto Dickens Enthusiast
The day was Sunday and the date was December 17th in the year of our Lord 1843. Mr. Charles Dickens, residing at home at Devonshire Terrace in London, was in excellent spirits. The reason for this positive outlook on life was the fact that Mr. Dickens had taken delivery of the pre-publication copies of his latest literary effort, which he called A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas. This small book, only 166 pages, had occupied Dickens’s creative mind for the past two months. He was writing it during short breaks of working on his current major project, the nineteen-month serialized picaresque novel The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44). A Christmas Carolwas destined to become Dickens’s best known and best loved work, in contrast to the now little-known novel on which Dickens had pinned his hopes for financial security.
The ‘Little Carol’, as Dickens called his book, was finally finished and had appeared in ‘all the glory of print’ on that day. Dickens was so very much pleased with the book that he wrote a short letter to his friend Daniel Maclise, inviting him to join him in a walk to the home of their mutual friend, Harrison Ainsworth, to deliver to him his copy of the Carol. The weather was unusually warm for London in December, so we can assume that their walk was a pleasant one, indeed. It is recorded that Dickens presented a dozen or more copies on the pre-publication days of December 17th and 18th to, among others, Baroness Burdett-Coutts, W.M. Thackeray, Thomas Carlyle, and his close friend and financial advisor John Forster.
December 19th, 1843, was the official date of publication of A Christmas Carol. The publishers, Chapman and Hall, must have been sure of its success because they issued the first edition in 6,000 copies. They were right – the reading public, who had turned their up their collective noses at Martin Chuzzlewit,did no such thing with Dickens’s latest effort. Indeed, the first edition of the Carol sold quickly, despite the rather steep price of five shillings per copy. A second and third edition of an additional 3,000 copies were printed and distributed to the trade in early 1844. The popularity of the book continued with the reading public, so that, by the end of the year 1844, a total of 15,000 copies of A Christmas Carol had been printed and sold, recalling the glory days of Pickwick sales.By 1860, the little scarlet book had gone through thirteen editions.
Needless to say that the reception of A Christmas Carol in Britain was overwhelmingly positive in speech and in print, with Thackeray calling the book “a National Benefit.” However, when we investigate the reception of A Christmas Carol in America, we find very little evidence of the book’s popularity in newspapers or in magazines. Perhaps the American press was still somewhat annoyed at Dickens’s anti-American/pro-copyright ranting in American Notes for General Circulation (1843), or perhaps Dickens’s description of America and its peculiar denizens in MartinChuzzlewit did not much impress American readers either.
Dickens received a letter from American friend Harvard Professor Cornelius Felton, with whom he had formed a fast friendship during his visit to Boston in 1842. The letter was received and read by Dickens on New Year’s Day, 1844. The next day, after expressing his great delight about receiving the letter, Dickens instructed Professor Felton as follows:
“Now, if instantly on receipt of this note, you will send someone down to the Cunard Wharf at Boston, you will find that Captain Hewitt of the Britannia Steam Ship (MY ship) has a small parcel for you… and in that parcel you will find A CHRISTMAS CAROL – IN PROSE. A ghost Story of Christmas by Charles Dickens.”
This is the first mention that we have of A Christmas Carol making the journey overseas to America. The steamship ship Britannia was the same ship on which Charles and Catherine Dickens had sailed to America in 1842. If we assume that the ship’s departure schedule would be similar in 1844 as it was in 1842, it would have left from Liverpool on or about January 4th, 1844. Again, assuming a similar arrival schedule in America in 1844 to that of 1842, the Britannia would have arrived in Boston on or about January 22nd—and with it the first volume ofA Christmas Carolon American shores.
The eminent Dickens bibliographer Walter Smith has authored Charles Dickens in the Original Cloth: Part One, A Bibliographical Catalogue of the First Appearance of His Writings in Book Form in England with Facsimiles of the Bindings and Titlepages (1982), a work devoted to the author’s British first editions. Last year, he edited the one-volume edition of Charles Dickens – First American Editions, which deals with the American first editions of the major novels. He is, at present, working on the second part of that bibliography, which will cover the American first editions of the minor works of Dickens including of A Christmas Carol.
Walter Smith has been extremely helpful in my attempts to gather information about of A Christmas Carol in America. For example, he has affirmed that the first book edition was by Harper and Brothers, who would later become Dickens’s American periodical licensees, and that it was put on sale on January 24th, 1844. He further states that three or perhaps four editions by were published Harper and Brothers in 1844 alone. The first publication date would coincide with the arrival of a copy or copies of the British first impression on or about January 22nd aboard the steamship Britannia.
The 1844 numbers of the weekly Albion, a newspaper designed specifically for expatriate Brits issued in New York, was publishing Martin Chuzzlewit at the time that the Carol arrived. However (surprisingly), it contains no advertisements for the Carol. The only reference to it occurs in the issue for February 3rd in which a shortened version of Nephew Fred’s speech to Scrooge – beginning with: ” I have always thought of Christmas time…” and ending with: “…and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys” is reproduced. Other than that – NOTHING! Very strange for a paper which published a piece by Dickens which was the first one to ever appear in America by the author. This early piece of Dickensiana was a sketch which was called “Mrs. Porter—Over the Way,” which appeared in the Albion on March 29, 1834. However, the Carol did make an appearance in New York in 1844, in The New World, a weekly magazine: the complete text of the novella was issued over the course of three numbers dated February 3, 10, and 17.
The only printed review of the book, which was traced by my friend and fellow ‘Dickens Enthusiast’ David Millross, appeared in The Knickerbocker, a New York monthly magazine, for March 1844 under ‘Literary Notices’. After the reviewer states that, if Dickens would “…not indulge in ridicule against American alleged peculiarities…” he continues to say “…if he would only, now and then present us with an intellectual creation so touching and beautiful as the one before us… The Christmas Carol is the most striking, the most picturesque, the most truthful of all the limnings which have proceeded from its author’s pen.”
The review continues for many more paragraphs with opinions by the reviewer and descriptions of the story’s settings and characters. As well, the reviewer makes use of a great many direct quotations from the book to summarize the story. The writer finishes thus: ” We have, in conclusion, but three words to say to every reader of THE KNICKERBOCKER who may peruse our notice of this production: READ THE WORK.” One may surmise that, in spite of Martin Chuzzlewit, he liked the Carol immensely.
The Harper edition of A Christmas Carol has always been considered by booksellers and collectors to be ‘an early edition’. They usually prefer to state that the 1844 Philadelphia edition by Carey and Hart was the ‘First American’ edition. However, Walter Smith has discovered that this edition was not published until April 19th, 1844, considerably later than the unillustrated Harper edition. That, of course, makes good sense. Harpers copy consists of 32 pages, double-spaced with wrappers but without illustrations. The Carey & Hart edition, in contrast, is an almost exact duplicate of the British first edition with similarity in binding, illustrations and gilt decorations. A text such as that would have taken considerably longer to produce and publish than the Harper issue. The fact remains that there must have been a market for an edition of that caliber and cost for it to be issued almost three months after the first and much less costly edition had appeared. The popularity of the book obviously spoke for itself. The authors of the Sotheby’s catalogue of the Suzannet Collection in November 1971 took no chances. They listed both the Harper and the Carey and Hart edition as ‘First American Edition.’
According to Walter Smith, there were over a dozen different American editions, both as separate issues and in collected works, of A Christmas Carol. These were published by more than ten different publishers and appeared during Dickens’s lifetime. Dickens scholar Bob Patten records that almost one hundred thousand copies of A Christmas Carol were sold in America during 1968. Very respectable for a book almost that was almost completely ignored by the press in the year of its first publication 125 years earlier.
Having consulted over two dozen reference books – biographies from Forster to Tomalin – bibliographies from Podeschi to Smith, letters – individual volumes and copies of the Pilgrim Edition, and a dozen or more different copies of A Christmas Carol with a variety of introductory material, I am sure that there are publications in the Library of Congress, which would, perhaps, have provided some additional information.
Editor’s note:
There are three further editions worthy of at least a mention, although they date from the late 1860s: The Ticknor Fields (Boston) Christmas Books anthology in the Diamond edition, issued to coincide with the start of Dickens’s second American reading tour in 1867 and illustrated by house artist Sol Eytinge, Jr. (*1833-1905); the same firm’s single-volume, elaborately illustrated A Christmas Carol – A Ghost Story of Christmas, again by Eytinge, issued for Christmas 1868; and the Harper and Brothers anthology in the American Household Edition, Christmas Stories (1876), illustrated by American expatriate Edwin Austin Abbey (1852-1911), who worked in the idiom of the Pre-Raphaelites. Unfortunately, the third great illustrator of Dickens, Felix Octavius Carr Darley (1822-88), never attempted the Carol, his frontispieces for the James G. Gregory Company of New York (1861) Christmas Books in two volumes dealing instead with The Cricket on the Hearth (vol. 1) and The Haunted Man (vol. 2).