Source: Good News Network
175 years ago today, Charles Dickens’ book A Christmas Carol was first published. The wildly successful novella depicts the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, an elderly miser who is visited by three ghosts—from Christmases Past, Present, and Yet to Come. During their nighttime visits on December 24, Scrooge is transformed into a kind and compassionate man—illustrating the real-life ability of any person to redeem themselves.
Written in 6 weeks, the first edition sold out in less than a week. He began public readings of the story later proved so successful he undertook 127 further performances until the year of his death. LEARN more and WATCH George C. Scott’s classic scene, ‘What Day is This?’… (1843)Dickens was, at the time, challenged by financial problems himself, even having written Oliver Twist, but he was especially dismayed by the sad lot of those around him in Victorian England: he toured the Cornish tin mines, where he saw children working in appalling conditions; he was disturbed by a London school for half-starved, illiterate street children. His new story would endeavor to break open readers’ hearts to feel compassion for these struggling classes.
His exclamation “Bah! Humbug!” became sealed in the English lexicon as an expression of cynical retort toward sentimentality, and the name “Scrooge” was forever after used as a designation for miserly selfishness, and was added to the Oxford English Dictionary as such in 1982.
MORE Good News on this Date:
- The Susan Constant, Godspeed, and Discovery departed England for Jamestown, Virginia, to settle what would be the first American colony (1606)
- Ben Franklin began publishing Poor Richard’s Almanac (1732)
- The first games of the National Hockey League were played, with four…
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