Dickens establishes his weekly magazine Household Words, which will be succeeded by the end of the decade by his publication All the Year Round.

1851 Dickens’s father dies. The author meets landscape painter Wilkie Collins, who has a gift for mystery writing; Dickens admires him greatly. Dickens’s theater troupe performs before Queen Victoria.
1852 Christmas Books collects A Christmas Carol, The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life, and The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain.
1854 As he begins composing Hard Times, Dickens goes to Preston, where workers had been on strike since October of the previous year. His sympathies rest with the workers, and Dickens believes the strike to be an “honest mistake.” He observes a speaker who influences his depiction of Mr. Slackbridge in Hard Times (although the Preston workers are less easily swayed than the fictional Coketown workers). Later, when the Illustrated London News comments that the strike in Preston was the basis for Dickens’s novel, he insists that the situation is widespread in England.
1857 Dickens’s marriage becomes increasingly strained. The Frozen Deep, a melodrama written jointly by Dickens and Collins, stars Dickens and the enchanting actress Ellen Ternan, with whom he falls in love. Ternan, twenty-seven years Dickens’s junior, haunts the author’s fiction from this time on. Dickens tours Switzerland and Italy with Collins and Egg.
1858 Dickens embarks on an exhausting series of public readings, which earn money but take a toll on his physical health. He and Catherine separate.
1859 A Tale of Two Cities is published.
1860 Dickens settles in rural Gadshill, his residence for the rest of his life.
1861 Great Expectations is published in three volumes. Dickens begins a second series of public readings that lasts two years.
1863 Dickens’s mother dies, followed by his son Walter’s death in India. After quarreling with Thackeray, Dickens reconciles with him just before Thackeray’s death. The world’s first subway, the Metropolitan Railway, opens in London.
1865 A shaken Dickens survives a disastrous train accident after he returns from France with Ellen Ternan, who is rumored to be his mistress.
1867 Dickens journeys again to America, where he reads publicly in Boston, New York, and Washington.
1868 After returning to England, Dickens continues to give public readings despite his declining health.
1870 Dickens begins his last series of readings in London. He publishes six parts of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, but the novel’s composition is halted by his sudden death in June. Charles Dickens is buried in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey.

INTRODUCTION

Between 1843 and 1848, Dickens wrote five novellas or long short stories that he published at Christmastime (A Christmas Carol, The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life, and The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain). The stories are not merely set at Christmas or the New Year’s holiday but contain themes the author felt were particularly appropriate to the season. While Christmas celebrations predate Dickens and there existed before him a tradition of telling ghost-tales at Christmas and the turn of the year, Dickens breathed a new and unique vigor into these celebrations and traditions that carry forward to this day. He wrote other ghost stories, almost all of which are spoofs or farces, but in his “Christmas books” allowed supernatural elements a power to awaken characters and readers from their social misanthropy.

So far as we know, A Christmas Carol was written in a single month and was a product of the author’s complete outrage. Not only the best written of all Dickens’s “Christmas books”—it is arguably one of the most artistic, least contrived, most psychologically correct and brilliant of all his books.

Unfortunately, no film version of the story has managed to adequately capture its profound qualities. Considering its short length and dramatic nature, its leanings toward visuals and dialogue, this is surprising. Patrick Stewart’s one-man stage show, largely based on Dickens’s own “prompt copy” (for many years Dickens traveled around England in one-man dramatic presentations of A Christmas Carol), was astounding, not merely because of the brilliance of the actor but also because he seems to realize that the story has nothing to do with money. Nothing to do with money! The most famous miser in the English language, and the story is not about money? Most decidedly. Dickens was born poor, grew up poor, and made his money on his own through tremendous hard work. He had no illusions about the misery of poverty, nor what money could do to ease life; but he equally had no illusions about what money could not do. Money cannot create a new spirit within a person; it acts solely upon character and attitudes that already exist. It cannot make happy a person who is of an unhappy nature, nor render generous a mean spirit. Nor is money itself a solution to any moral problem; only as the outward expression of a genuine inward desire to help does it have any effect.

And to Dickens that genuine inward desire to help is of more real worth than any quantity of coin. G. K. Chesterton (best known for his Father Brown mysteries) rightly said of Dickens that he was not political.