JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Even if you don't celebrate Christmas, it's hard to ignore. And if you do celebrate the holiday, chances are you've adapted some traditions that were popularized in the mid-1800s by one writer - Charles Dickens. Rund Abdelfatah and Ramtin Arablouei at NPR's history podcast Throughline bring us the story of Charles Dickens' social mission and how his book "A Christmas Carol" helped shape the holiday we know today.
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RUND ABDELFATAH, BYLINE: The basic story goes, it's Christmas Eve, and a miserly old man named Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by three ghosts who take him into the past, present and future to teach him the value of kindness and generosity, the true spirit of Christmas. The book was an overnight sensation, and Charles Dickens, already famous, became a legend.
LEON LITVACK: Some people would consider him the originator of Christmas or the inventor of Christmas.
RAMTIN ARABLOUEI, BYLINE: This is Leon Litvack. He's a professor of Victorian studies at Queen's University in Belfast and editor of the Charles Dickens Letters Project.
LITVACK: I think that, even more than Christmas, Dickens is well-known for his championship of social issues.
ARABLOUEI: Before "A Christmas Carol," the holiday wasn't as widely celebrated as it is today. Many people didn't even get the day off work.
ABDELFATAH: It wasn't just men working in the factories. Women and children were also keeping the machines running. They worked 12-hour days under harsh conditions and were at the mercy of their employer. Labor was the heartbeat of the Industrial Revolution, and profit was its king.
ARABLOUEI: Dickens himself worked in a factory as a kid, and he was determined to never go back. So in the late 1820s, he decided to pursue a career in journalism. And then...
LUCINDA DICKENS-HAWKSLEY: He started writing short stories, and these were his first works of fiction.
ABDELFATAH: This is Lucinda Dickens-Hawksley, a historian of Victorian England and Charles Dickens' great-great-great-granddaughter.
DICKENS-HAWKSLEY: One of the things that made Dickens more popular than other writers was that his works dealt not just with the upper classes, which is what most authors of that time had done. And what Dickens did was he wrote about everybody, from aristocracy down to street sweepers, and everybody could identify with him.
ABDELFATAH: Dickens would walk the streets of London for hours at night, thinking.
DICKENS-HAWKSLEY: It was the biggest city in the world. There were people of all classes from all over the world.
ABDELFATAH: A London that was in the grips of what are now known as the Hungry '40s. On his walks, Dickens would have seen people living on the street, streets that were filled with horse manure and human waste. He would have seen children without shoes, with holes in their clothes, shivering in the chilly autumn air.
ARABLOUEI: And the more Dickens saw on his walks, the more riled up he got. A story was forming in his mind.
DICKENS-HAWKSLEY: What he called a story that would strike a sledgehammer blow on behalf of the poor man's child.
ABDELFATAH: In just six weeks, Dickens had finished his book. He called it "A Christmas Carol." His publisher was sure it was going to flop. And with his debt stacking up, Dickens personally invested in publishing 6,000 copies of the book.
LITVACK: The first edition sold out almost immediately.
DICKENS-HAWKSLEY: It was an instant success, a kind of overnight success.
ABDELFATAH: In England and around the world. And so in 1867, Dickens made a trip to the U.S. He traveled by train from as far south as Washington, D.C., and as far north as Maine, hosting hundreds of readings, hitting up major cities like New York and Boston.
DICKENS-HAWKSLEY: Everything he did just sold out.
LITVACK: "Christmas Carol" became kind of the do-it-yourself manual for how to do Christmas.
ARABLOUEI: And people were really doing Christmas - the parties, the songs, the giving to those in need.
LITVACK: People spoke about the humanity that Dickens had inserted into the holiday.
ARABLOUEI: The commercial side of Christmas was growing, too. The first Christmas card was sold in 1843, the year "A Christmas Carol" published. The first in-store Santa appeared in Macy's department store in the 1860s. And on that U.S. trip in 1867, Dickens himself was a product.
LITVACK: We mustn't forget that it was also a commercial venture and, indeed, one in which Dickens himself invested. He was never completely a humanitarian. He was always the consummate businessman.
ABDELFATAH: OK, so Dickens had a little Scrooge in him, too. There were ways in which "A Christmas Carol" did seem like it was having the kind of impact Dickens had hoped for, or at least according to the lore.
DICKENS-HAWKSLEY: There's a story that he was giving a talk in Boston, giving a reading from "A Christmas Carol," and in his audience was a factory owner from Chicago who had a Scrooge-like epiphany, who went back to Chicago and said that from that, time on, all his employees would get Christmas Day off and every family who worked for him would be given a turkey every Christmas.
ABDELFATAH: But Lucinda Dickens-Hawksley, his great, great, great granddaughter, says that Dickens also had a healthy dose of skepticism. That turkey at Christmas was a nice gesture, but what about the 364 other days of the year? How were workers treated? Who looked out for the poor? Were things really changing for the better?
DICKENS-HAWKSLEY: Nothing was ever enough for Dickens. He was a campaigner all his life. He wrote journalism right up to the end. He never stopped being frustrated by the human condition, by, you know, political situations.
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ABDELFATAH: Dickens died in 1870, just a couple years after returning from his trip. Two weeks after his death, Christmas was made a federal holiday in the U.S.
What do you think the Christmas book that Dickens, if he were alive today, would look like?
DICKENS-HAWKSLEY: To be fair, I think Ebenezer Scrooge is absolutely alive and kicking in many areas of the world. There is still a huge amount of child poverty. There's so much inequality of wealth. When Scrooge basically is pretty much all of us, everybody needs to look around them and see what needs to change. Everybody needs to understand that, actually, nothing is going to change unless we do.
SUMMERS: That was author Lucinda Dickens-Hawksley and professor Leon Litvack speaking with Throughline hosts Ramtin Arablouei and Rund Abdelfatah. You can hear the whole episode by listening to Throughline wherever you find your podcasts.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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