ABSTRACT
Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol retains a profound presence in Transatlantic seasonal celebrations and the popular image of the festive period. While the book’s reception in the United Kingdom has been well studied, its early progress through nineteenth-century American popular culture has received much less attention and existing accounts of its rise to popularity are contradictory. This article, therefore, is an attempt to trace the ways that American readers and audiences responded to this defining Transatlantic text in the decades between its first publication and Dickens’s death in 1870. After exploring its immediate reception in the wake of its first publication in America, I examine the changing status of A Christmas Carol in relation to both Dickens’s American reading tour of 1867–8 and the aftermath of his death – finding the book, throughout those decades, to be a crucial arbiter of both the popular idea of Christmas and the reputation of Dickens and his work more broadly.
In America, A Christmas Carol was dead: to begin with. At least, that’s one version of its first Transatlantic reception. The story goes like this: in 1842, Dickens had travelled to America. Feted as a literary hero throughout his sojourn in the New World, America’s adulation swiftly turned sour as Dickens began publishing books about his experiences in the United States. In both American Notes (1842) and Martin Chuzzlewit (serialised 1842–1844), Dickens painted a portrait of America that was less than flattering; both texts were received as a profound betrayal for the kindnesses that he had been shown during his visit. Arriving in the middle of this bad-tempered feud, A Christmas Carol, first published in London on 19 December 1843, got lost in the rancour. As Paul Davis has briefly summarised, ‘the Carol’s American reception was chilled by resentment’. According to Davis, it wasn’t until well into the twentieth century that Dickens’s Christmas vision was ‘as popular in America as it was in Britain’ (1990b, 150). Penne Restad echoes the idea that, at least at first, ‘Americans were less enthusiastic’ about this seasonal offering (1995, 136). But were they? Because contrarily, Walter E. Smith has recently declared, in his bibliographical history of American editions of the book: ‘The publication by the Harper Brothers of A Christmas Carol on 24 January 1844’—the first American edition—‘was sensational, and restored Dickens’s prominence […] several impressions of it appeared in the year. Other publishers rapidly produced copies’ (2019, xv). Bah, Humbug-ish rejection or Scrooge-like redemption: how should we understand this pivotal moment in Transatlantic literary and popular culture?
It may be surprising that this is a difficult question to answer, and that a detailed account of A Christmas Carol’s early reception in America is lacking, given the uniquely prominent position that this Victorian book occupies in the American imagination. In Juliet John’s terms, A Christmas Carol ‘has been the most adapted, widely disseminated and commercially successful of all Dickens’s works’ (2011, 79). More than that, as Davis notes, it has been ‘adapted, revised, condensed, retold, re-originated, and modernized more than any other work of English literature’ until it has become a ‘culture-text’, composed of its many iterations, that almost lives a life apart from its textual origins. This process remains a ‘continuing creative process in the Anglo-American imagination’—arguably, with the emphasis on American (1990b, 110–11). If anything, Dickens’s book retains a greater hold on the American seasonal imagination than it does in the country of its creation: each year, new American adaptations and reworkings of A Christmas Carol are added to the pile and released to the world; each year, thousands of Americans flock to Dickens fairs to experience what the organisers of San Francisco’s leading immersive seasonal experience describe as ‘an evening in Victorian London’ where ‘it is always Christmas Eve’ and revellers can party with Mr. Fezziwig before experiencing ‘the illustrious author himself’ reading from A Christmas Carol (dickensfair.com). Arguably, it is the single most significant Transatlantic text. In popular culture terms, Dickens’s festive London now exists primarily as an invented and imagined space that is neither British nor American but a hyperreal hybrid of both.
