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MERRY CHRISTMAS! Blithely do we use this phrase as greeting, farewell or exclamation of joy with little thought to the book that made it famous. Although it was in use from the 16th century, it was Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol—published 175 years ago almost to the day —that really popularised it.

By the same token, ‘Bah! Humbug!’ entered popular usage and everyone knows what it means to be called a Scrooge (even if they’ve never read the book)— a miserly grouch who believes that ‘Every idiot who goes about with “Merry Christmas” on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart’. He is pictured (right) with the jovial Ghost of Christmas Present.

Published on December 19, 1843, with the first edition sold out by Christmas Eve, the didactic novella’s legacy further extends to an almost immediate rise in charitable giving, recorded in The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1844; for years afterwards, Maud of Wales, Queen of Norway, sent gifts to London’s crippled children signed ‘With Tiny Tim’s Love’.

At the time, Dickens was gravely concerned with the growing masses of poor, hungry and uneducated, particularly children. Six months after the book’s publication, the Factories Act decreed that children between the ages of nine and 13 could work only nine hours a day, six days a week maximum, which was considered humane.

Given Dickens’s charitable leanings, the book was bizarrely extravagant in its first edition (which he funded himself), in ‘brown-salmon fineribbed cloth, blocked in blind and gold on front; in gold on the spine… all edges gilt’, costing 5s. Even so, since 1943, it has never been out of print, it’s the most adapted of all Dickens’s works and still embodies the spirit of Christmas goodwill for many. God bless us, every one!

‘Please, sir. I want some more’: The pivotal role of food in Dickens’s stories, particularly with respect to how it represented his sense of social justice, is explored in a new exhibition at the Charles Dickens Museum, London WC1, ‘Food Glorious Food: Dinner with Dickens’. Upon entering the house, visitors are invited to experience the exhibition as either a servant or a guest (until April 22, 2019, 020–7405 2127; www.dickensmuseum. com).

Edited by Annunciata Elwes