REFLECTIONS

(Compliments of http://www.actionvisioncoaching.com/)

Dear Friends,

This true historical story about Charles Dickens and the circumstance he wrote a Christmas Carol in should be an inspiration to us all. I should especially inspire any of you who are in the mist of self-doubt and struggling with how to make ends meet. Take heart from this true story and go create your own Christmas Carol by helping others.

Wishing you all the best,

Coach Dana

The Story Behind A Christmas Carol

In the midst of self-doubt and confusion, a man sometimes does his best work. From the storm of tribulation comes a gift. For Charles Dickens, a little Christmas novel brought newfound faith in himself and in the redemptive joy of the season.

From its first publication in 1843, A Christmas Carol has charmed and inspired millions. Less well known is the fact that this little book of celebration grew out of a dark period in the author’s career—and, in some ways, changed the course of his life forever.

On an early October evening, Charles Dickens stepped from his home. He was deeply troubled. The 31-year-old father of four had thought he was at the peak of his career. But now, the celebrated writer was facing serious financial problems.

Some months earlier, his publisher had revealed that sales of the new novel were not what had been expected, and it might be necessary to sharply reduce Dickens’s monthly advances against future sales.

The news had stunned the author. It seemed his talent was being questioned. Memories of his childhood poverty resurfaced. Dickens was supporting a large, extended family, and his expenses were already more than he could handle and his wife was expecting their fifth child.

All summer long, Dickens worried about his mounting bills, especially the large mortgage that he owed on his house. He knew that he needed an idea that would earn him a large sum of money, and he needed the idea quickly. But in his depression, Dickens was finding it difficult to write. He hoped that resuming his nightly walks would help spark his imagination.

The yellow glow from the flickering gas lamps lit his way through London’s better neighborhoods. Then gradually, as he neared the Thames River, only the dull light from tenement windows illuminated the streets, now litter-strewn and lined with open sewers. The elegant ladies and well-dressed gentlemen of Dickens’s neighborhood were replaced by bawdy streetwalkers, pickpockets, and beggars.

The dismal scene reminded him of the nightmare of his childhood. He had worked 12 hours a day, six days a week to earn the six shillings to keep him alive. His father was in debtors’ prison. He felt helpless, abandoned. Fortunately, Dickens’s father had inherited some money, enabling him to pay off his debts and get out of prison. Thankfully he had escaped the dreary fate.

But now the fear of being unable to pay his own debts haunted Dickens. Wearily, he started home from his long walk, no closer to an idea than he’d been when he started out. However, as he neared home, he felt the sudden flash of inspiration. What about a Christmas story! He would write one for the very people he passed on the black streets of London. People who lived and struggled with the same fears and longings he had known, people who hungered for a bit of cheer and hope.

The book would have to be short, certainly not a full novel. It would have to be finished by the end of November to be printed and distributed in time for Christmas sales. The basic plot was simple enough for children to understand, but evoked themes that would conjure up warm memories and emotions in an adult’s heart: After retiring alone to his cold, barren apartment on Christmas Eve, Ebenezer Scrooge, a miserly London businessman, is visited by the spirit of his dead partner, Jacob Marley. Doomed by his greed and insensitivity to his fellow man when alive, Marley’s ghost wanders the world in chains forged of his own indifference. He warns Scrooge that he must change, or suffer the same fate. The ghosts of Christmas Past, Christmas Present and Christmas Yet to Come appear and show Scrooge poignant scenes from his life and what will occur if he doesn’t mend his ways. Filled with remorse, Scrooge renounces his former selfishness and becomes a kind, generous, loving person who has learned the true spirit of Christmas.

Gradually, in the course of his writing, something surprising happened to Dickens. What had begun as a desperate, calculated plan to rescue himself from debt soon began to work a change in the author. A Christmas Carol captured his heart and soul. It became a labor of love. Every time he dipped his quill pen into his ink, the characters seemed magically to take life: Tiny Tim with his crutches, Scrooge cowering in fear before the ghosts, Bob Cratchit drinking Christmas cheer in the face of poverty.

Each morning, Dickens grew excited and impatient to begin the day’s work. “I was very much affected by the little book,” he later wrote a newspaperman, and was “reluctant to lay it aside for a moment.” A friend and Dickens’s future biographer, John Forster, took note of the “strange mastery” the story held over the author. Dickens told a professor in America how, when writing, he “wept, and laughed, and wept again.” Dickens even took charge of the design of the book, deciding on a gold-stamped cover, a red-and-green title page with colored endpapers, and four hand-colored etchings and four engraved woodcuts. To make the book affordable to the widest audience possible, he priced it at only five shillings.

On December 2, he was finished, and the manuscript went to the printers. On December 17, the author’s copies were delivered, and Dickens was delighted. He had never doubted that A Christmas Carol would be popular. But neither he nor his publishers were ready for the overwhelming response that came.

Despite the book’s public acclaim, it did not turn into the immediate financial success that Dickens had hoped for, because of the quality production he demanded and the low price he placed on the book. Nevertheless, he made enough money from it to scrape by, and A Christmas Carol’s enormous popularity revived his audience for subsequent novels, while giving a fresh, new direction to his life and career.

In a very real sense, Dickens popularized many aspects of the Christmas we celebrate today, including great family gatherings, seasonal drinks and dishes and gift giving. Even our language has been enriched by the tale. Who has not known a “Scrooge,” or uttered “Bah! Humbug!” when feeling irritated or disbelieving. And the phrase “Merry Christmas!” gained wider usage after the story appeared.