Free The Man Who Invented Christmas by Les Standiford

was forgotten.” Thoughts of moving to a “cheap and delightful climate, in Normandy or Brittany” were set aside. Dickens had six weeks in which to write and produce A Christmas Carol (and there were at least two installments of Martin Chuzzlewit due as well).
    “I was most horribly put out for a little while,” Dickens wrote to Forster, “but having eased my mind by that note to you, and taken a turn or two up and down the room, I went at it again, and soon got so interested that I blazed away till late last night; only stopping ten minutes for dinner.”

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    O f course, as he was writing, Dickens—especially given his recent experience—could not be certain of the reception for his new project. He could only follow his instincts and hope that he was right.
    So he pressed on with the writing of it, though he was sometimes resentful of his other obligations, including that ill-received novel he was committed to. On November 10, he wrote to Forster, “I have been all day in Chuzzlewit agonies—conceiving only. I hope to bring forth tomorrow.” But from there he went on to the object closer to his heart: “Will you come here at six? I want to say a word or two about the cover of the Carol and the advertising, and to consult you on a nice point in the tale. It will come wonderfully I think.”
    It might be helpful to interject a note here on typical publishing practice of the day. Although publishers, including Chapman and Hall, certainly made the decisions about what they were and were not interested in publishing (and indeed often approached authors rather than the other way around), once an agreement was struck, relatively little editing of a submitted manuscript went on inside the publishing house. That chore was left largely to the writer, though sometimes an “adviser” or unofficial editor such as Forster might take a hand in the process.
    As a glance at the substantially marked-up original manuscript of A Christmas Carol in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York bears out, Dickens was careful and demanding of himself. And once such a manuscript was submitted to the publisher, it would become a poor printer’s task to decipher the ink-blotted annotations of the author and create page proofs.
    In Dickens’s case, both he and Forster would receive copies of the proofs for final review. Forster’s emendations were usually limited to minor matters of grammar and punctuation, though he occasionally gave more substantive advice. He wrote, in fact, that he had been the one to suggest one of the most powerful developments in The Old Curiosity Shop. Of Little Nell, Forster explained, Dickens “had not thought of killing her.”
    In any case, Forster, for his part, was glad to see Dickens so galvanized over his new project. “My reluctance to any present change in his publishing arrangements,” his adviser says in The Life, “was connected with the little story, which amid all his troubles and ‘Chuzzlewit agonies,’ he was steadily carrying to its close; and which remains a splendid proof of the consciousness of power felt by him, and of his confidence that it had never been greater than when his readers were thus falling off from him.”
    With such dogged certainty guiding him, Dickens plunged ahead on what he was calling A Christmas Carol in Prose: Being a Ghost Story of Christmas. And as he wrote, he also planned for what would become of all that writing.
    For an illustrator, Dickens sought out John Leech, a popular cartoonist for Punch, whom Dickens had met shortly after the suicide of Seymour, his original collaborator on The Pickwick Papers. Leech, only nineteen at the time, was one of a number of illustrators who sought to replace Seymour, but Dickens wrote back to Leech that while the sample of work that he had submitted was “extremely well received, and executed,” unfortunately Chapman and Hall had already chosen another artist.
    In the meantime, however, Leech had begun to make a name for