Free The Man Who Invented Christmas by Les Standiford Page B

success, then—one that, as he confided to friends, might earn him as much as a quick £1,000, not an insignificant sum for a man who had been making £200 a month for installments of Martin Chuzzlewit. “I plunged headlong into a little scheme,” he told Macvey Napier, editor of the Edinburgh Review, and after setting “an artist at work upon it,” put everything else out of his mind, “For carrying out the notion I speak of, and being punctual with Chuzzlewit, will occupy every moment of my working time, up to the Christmas Holidays.”
    For all his calculations regarding the undertaking, Dickens was apparently consumed by the emotional power of his own creation. “I was very much affected by the little Book myself,” he told the journalist and songwriter Charles Mackay. “In various ways, as I wrote it; and had an interest in the idea, which made me reluctant to lay it aside for a moment.”
    His zeal led him to decline social outings with friends such as the illustrator George Cruickshank, to whom he wrote on November 25, “I am afraid I may not be in the way tomorrow; and therefore write to you. For I am finishing a little Book for Christmas, and contemplate a Bolt, to do so in peace. As soon as I have done, I will let you know, and then I hope we shall take a glass of Grog together: for I have not seen you since I was grey.”
    Likewise he put off a late-November meeting with his lawyer Thomas Mitton, promising, “On Monday Evening I will come to you. Your note found me in the full passion of a roaring Christmas scene.” (He perhaps meant the Cratchit family feast, though the most “roaring” of the scenes in the book describes Fezziwigs’ Christmas party early on, where “There were more dances, and there were forfeits, and more dances, and there was cake, and was negus [wine punch], and there was a great piece of Cold Roast, and there was a great piece of Cold Boiled, and there were mince-pies, and plenty of beer.” And there was also Mrs. Fezziwig being twirled around and around in dance by Mr. Fezziwig, whose stockinged calves “shone in every part of the dance like moons.”)
    On November 25, he also wrote to his friend Marion Ely, offering similar apologies for his conduct as a correspondent: “Forgive my not having answered your kind note; but I have been working from morning until night upon my little Christmas Book; and have really had no time to think of anything but that.” To his fellow novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton (whose novel Paul Cli ff ord started with the now-famous line “It was a dark and stormy night”) he would confide, “I was so closely occupied with my little Carol (the idea of which had just occurred to me), that I never left home before the owls went out; and led quite a solitary life.”
    Driven by such singlemindedness, Dickens completed work on the manuscript in late November, scarcely six weeks after he had begun. And though it was a demanding stretch, A Christmas Carol did not total a quarter of the word count of his earlier, twenty-installment works. Furthermore, Dickens had enjoyed the luxury of completing a project as a whole for the first time. There were no installments, no intrusions by the critics as he went along, and—for all his cares and pressures—far fewer interruptions by outsiders (the “persons from Porlock,” as Coleridge termed the unwanted intruders upon an artist’s den.)
    Dickens made a few last, judicious edits, including those in the first sentence of the last succinct paragraph, where he transformed a weak “He never had any further intercourse with spirits,” into the authoritative prose that marks the whole, saying of Scrooge, “He had no further intercourse with spirits.” And with that work done, Dickens scrawled an emphatic “The End” and added three pairs of double underscores for emphasis.
    Then he went to work on actually producing the book itself. He sat with Leech, examining preliminary drawings of each of the