1. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

2. Charles Dickens 1812-1870 Born and lived in London, England Writer
16 Major Novels
Revolutionized novel writing
A civil rights leader for the poor

3. Debtors Prison Son of John and Elizabeth Dickens Father went into debt
Parents sent to debtors prison
Charles removed from school
Forced to work at blacking factory to pay off parents debt

4. Words Used in Time

5. Influence on Dickens
His time spent working at a blacking factory was a pivotal point in that story. 
At the age of 11 young Charley Dickens was sent, by a father and mother whose finances were out of control, to earn 5 or 6 shillings a week in a boot-blacking factory, pasting labels onto pots of blacking. 
After his parents were sent to debtor’s prison, he was left to wander the streets, to fend for himself,
Dickens later wrote of the trauma of this time of his life, and the impact it had on shaping his character.  The impact was equally powerful in shaping the books he wrote, the causes he championed, the politics he pursued. 

6. Overnight Bestseller Published December 19, 1843
Sold 8,000 copies in first week
Many people were illiterate
People either read it or had it read to them
Known as “the little book”
Instant success
Today more copies than any other book except the Bible

7. Child Labor

8. Working Conditions
This new, brutal reality of child labor was the result of revolutionary changes in British society.
The population of England had grown 64% between Dickens’ birth in 1812 and the year of the child labor report.
Workers were leaving the countryside to crowd into new manufacturing centers and cities.
Meanwhile, there was a revolution in the way goods were manufactured: cottage industry was upended by a trend towards workers serving as unskilled cogs laboring in the pre-cursor of the assembly line, hammering the same nail or gluing the same piece—as an 11-year-old Dickens had to do—hour after hour, day after day.
Dickens read the testimony of girls who sewed dresses for the expanding market of middle class consumers; they regularly worked 16 hours a day, six days a week, rooming—like Martha Cratchit—above the factory floor. He read of 8-year-old children who dragged coal carts through tiny subterranean passages over a standard 11-hour workday.

9. 1843 London

10. Dickens London

11. Ebenezer Scrooge

12. Marley the Ghost

13. Ghost of Christmas Past

14. Ghost of Christmas Present

15. Ghost of Christmas Future.. (yet to come)

16. Long Lasting Effects Made people want and learn to read
Created social awareness of poverty
Created social awareness of child labor
Created social awareness of orphans
People reacted
Social classicism was identified

17. Influence on Christmas
Not a novel about religion or Christmas, but ended up revolutionizing the holiday
Christmas celebration in decline before novel
Industrial revolution (work) allowed little time for workers to celebrate
Dickens and his novel had more influence on Christmas than any other person except one

18. Oh, and…Santa Claus

19. Dickens says…
“The holidays are a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of other people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys".
This was what Dickens described for the rest of his life as the "Carol Philosophy".

20. Father Christmas
Dickens' name had become so synonymous with Christmas that on hearing of his death in 1870 a little costermonger's girl in London asked, "Mr. Dickens dead? Then will Father Christmas die too?"