None has nearly as much to do with Christmas as “A Christmas Carol,” with New Year’s the key holiday in “The Chimes” and “Cricket on the Hearth” and the Christmas dinner at the end of “The Haunted Man” feeling like something of an afterthought.

Three of the four successor books feature supernatural interventions and at least a dollop of social commentary, with the gentlemen and politicians who keep saying awful things about and to poor people in “The Chimes” arguably coming off even worse than Ebenezer Scrooge. “A Christmas Carol” was a hit, and it enabled Dickens to pay his bills, but it wasn’t quite the cash cow it would be in an age of strictly enforced copyright laws. Seven were unauthorized, though, and pirated editions of the book circulated widely as well. Within weeks there were eight different stage adaptations playing in London. 17, and its first print run of 6,000 copies had sold out by Christmas Eve. “A Christmas Carol in Prose: Being a Ghost Story of Christmas” was published Dec. The book took Dickens only six weeks to finish, and the money flowed soon after. His sixth novel, “Martin Chuzzlewit,” was not selling well, relatives were hitting him up for loans, and he was having trouble making the rent payments on the big London house he had moved his family into a few years earlier. But he also wrote it because he needed money. Charles Dickens wrote “A Christmas Carol” in 1843 in part because he was appalled at the living conditions of England’s urban poor, especially after a visit that September to a so-called Ragged School for London slum children.

Christmas books charles dickens