A Christmas Carol

Reader's note

A Christmas Carol was first published a few days before christmas, 1843 and at the public readings that Dickens gave was the great favourite. Mr G.K. Chesterton, most brilliant and understanding of Dickens’ critics, has summed up excellently the reason why a christmas carol has remained so popular. ‘The beauty is the real blessing of the story’, he says, ‘do not lie in the mechanical plot of it, the repentance of scrooge, probable or improbable; they lie in the great furnace of real happiness that glows through Scrooge and everything around him; that great furnace, the heart of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is a fairy tale, parable, and sermon rolled into one, in which everything happens just as it ought to happen in perfect realization of ‘On earth peace, goodwill toward men’