Traditional festive tale A Christmas Carol has been adapted for TV once again and the BBC’s latest re-telling will air on BBC One over Christmas.
A Christmas Carol tells the tale of Scrooge, a miserly old man who hates Christmas and is mean-spirited to everyone around him. One cold Christmas Eve, Scrooge is visited by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Christmas Present and Christmas Future, who seek to show the selfish, elderly businessman the error of his ways and guide him towards learning the true joys and important parts of life.
Executive produced by Tom Hardy and starring Guy Pearce as Ebenezer Scrooge alongside a star-studded cast the includes Charlotte Riley, Stephen Graham, Andy Serkis and Vinette Robinson, the first episode of the new A Christmas Carol series airs on December 22 at 9pm on BBC One.
But who wrote the original novel and when was it published?
Who wrote the A Christmas Carol book and what year did it come out?
A Christmas Carol is a novella that was first published by Chapman & Hall in 1843.
The book was written by author Charles Dickens and was originally illustrated by John Leech.
The book was published in London on December 19 1843 and the initial print run of 6,000 copies had sold out by Christmas Eve.
Of all Charles Dickens’ works, A Christmas Carol has had the most television adaptations and films made of it – a fact that may not have actually pleased the Victorian author if he had been alive today.
The Charles Dickens Museum notes, in regards to their new exhibition Beautiful Books: Dickens and the Business of Christmas, that although Dickens very much ‘cornered’ the Christmas publishing market from the 1840s following the publication of A Christmas Carol, he would live to somewhat regret it.
‘Later in his career, he began to distance himself from what had become an annual flood of festive books, stories and stocking fillers.,’ the museum observes.
In reference to Christmas, he wrote to a friend in 1868: ‘I am sick of the thing’.
Bah Humbug.
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