The Pamphlet Dickens Never Wrote

The story as it is told

Charles Dickens needed money. It is 1843, the bills are mounting, and he sits down to write a little Christmas book in a hurry. Six weeks later it is done: a miser, three ghosts, a small, frail boy called Tiny Tim, and a title that will outlive them all. The book saves his finances, the story goes, and that is exactly why he wrote it.

Tiny Tim, the telling continues, was not made up. He was Dickens's nephew Harry Burnett, a disabled boy in the house of Dickens's sister Fanny in Manchester, and Dickens carried him into the book.

What we can confirm

The six weeks hold up. The debt motive is one of several, and Dickens's own letters and Hawksley's account put a social motive first: a child-labour report that left him, in his words, "stricken down," and a pamphlet he chose to turn into a story. Harry Burnett is one candidate for Tiny Tim, named by Hawksley; other scholars name other candidates or none.

In May 1843, according to Dickens biographer Lucinda Hawksley writing for BBC Culture, Dickens went to a fundraising dinner for the Charterhouse Square infirmary, a charity for elderly poor men. The guests were mostly rich men from the City of London, and Dickens described them afterward, in a letter to his friend Douglas Jerrold, as "sleek, slobbering, bow-paunched, overfed, apoplectic, snorting cattle."

That year he also read a parliamentary report on child workers in Britain, which Hawksley attributes to the reformer Dr. Thomas Southwood Smith. Dickens said he was "stricken down" by it. His first plan was a pamphlet, An Appeal to the People of England, on Behalf of the Poor Man's Child, to appear "with my name attached, of course." The longer he thought about it, Hawksley writes, the less he believed a pamphlet would do. He wanted something that would strike "a sledgehammer blow" for poor children, with "twenty thousand times the force" of a government paper.

In October 1843 Dickens went to Manchester to speak for the Athenaeum, an educational charity for working people. In his speech he mocked the idea that "a little learning is a dangerous thing" with a comparison to hanging: because "a little hanging was dangerous, we had a great deal of it." His older sister Fanny lived in Manchester with her husband Henry Burnett and their sons. Hawksley identifies their disabled son Harry as the inspiration for Tiny Tim and notes that, unlike Tim, Harry did not survive.

Back in London, the first known mention of the book is in a letter to the Scottish editor Macvey Napier on October 24, 1843: "I plunged headlong into a little scheme... [and] set an artist at work upon it." The artist was John Leech. Dickens wrote for six weeks and finished on December 2. He was overdrawn at the bank, and his publishers, Chapman and Hall, had little faith in the project.

A Christmas Carol was published on December 19, 1843, in an edition of 6,000 copies. On Christmas Eve Chapman and Hall wrote that orders were "coming in fast from town and country" and a reprint would soon be needed. William Makepeace Thackeray reviewed it in Fraser's Magazine: "It seems to me a national benefit, and to every man or woman who reads it a personal kindness."

The pamphlet survives inside the story. In the visit of the Ghost of Christmas Present, two children cling to the spirit's robe. "This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want," the Ghost says. "Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy." Hawksley calls this Dickens's main reason for writing the book. The scene is often cut from adaptations, which makes it a useful test for any new version: does it keep the argument Dickens wrote the book to make?

The facts

• May 1843 Charterhouse Square infirmary dinner; letter to Jerrold ("sleek, slobbering..."); "stricken down" by the 1843 child-labour report (attributed to Southwood Smith); planned pamphlet title; "a sledgehammer blow"; "twenty thousand times the force"; Manchester Athenaeum speech, Oct 1843; Harry Burnett as Tiny Tim's inspiration; Napier letter, Oct 24, 1843; finished Dec 2; published Dec 19, 1843, 6,000 copies; Christmas Eve reprint letter; Thackeray in Fraser's. Lucinda Hawksley, BBC Culture, Dec 22, 2017, bbc.com
• Ignorance and Want passage. A Christmas Carol, Project Gutenberg #46, gutenberg.org
• Letter to Douglas Jerrold, Devonshire Terrace, May 3, 1843: "Oh Heaven, if you could have been with me at a hospital dinner last Monday!... Sleek, slobbering, bow-paunched, over-fed, apoplectic, snorting cattle, and the auditory leaping up in their delight!" The Letters of Charles Dickens, vol. 1, 1833-1856, ed. by his sister-in-law and eldest daughter (1880), Project Gutenberg #25852, gutenberg.org Note the 1880 text prints "over-fed".
• Manchester Athenaeum speech dated October 5, 1843, with the "little hanging" passage. Dickens, Speeches: Literary and Social (1880), Project Gutenberg #824, gutenberg.org, heading "MANCHESTER, OCTOBER 5, 1843".
• The Napier letter (Oct 24, 1843), the "twenty thousand times" and "sledgehammer blow" letters, and the "stricken down" remark are quoted from Hawksley (BBC Culture); their Pilgrim edition texts are not free online. Attribute them "as quoted by Lucinda Hawksley."

Related: What enters the public domain in 2027

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