Updated
Friday, 18th December 2020, 5:42 pm
It’s perhaps the most famous of all Christmas stories, written by Charles Dickens in 1843 – at the height of Britain’s first industrial revolution – and published on 19 December that year. The first edition had sold out by Christmas Day, and the little book was in its 13th edition by the time Christmas 1844 came round; perhaps because, as much as any of Dickens’s full-length novels, the story offered an unforgettable vision of the huge economic inequalities created by rapid social and industrial change, of the sheer cruelty of a society in which wealthy individuals took no responsibility for those harsh social divisions, and of how their attitudes conflicted with the message of love and goodwill that lies at the heart of Christmas, then fast becoming the biggest family festival of the year.