"A Christmas Carol"--A Bit of Background

I got this from Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Christmas_Carol

Dickens wrote the story in 1843. Just sort of dashed it off to pay a debt.

Must be nice.

Doing that, he pretty much single-handedly revived Christmas, which had gone into a decline.

I'm trying to figure out why Christmas was going into a decline. Queen Victoria married Prince Albert in 1840, and the prince was credited with bringing the Christmas tree (a German custom) to England. I can recall no mention of a Christmas tree in the story, so perhaps the custom had not yet caught on.

Christmas had been a big deal up until the Civil War, which, in England, happened a couple of hundred years before ours. When the Puritans took over, Christmas was just another day, as they thought all the excessive revelry associated with it was sacrilegious. At the Restoration, in 1660, when kings returned to England in the person of Charles II, Christmas fun was restored as well. I suspect it must have gone out of style as a victim of industrialization. People were needed in the factories, and worked for practically nothing. There was not much to celebrate, or to celebrate with.

There are some things, taken for granted in Dickens' time, that might need to be explained today. One that jumps out is the necessity for someone in the Cratchit family to go out to get the goose. Well. The fact is that most people cooked on their fires, and a poor family like the Cratchits would not have owned an oven. Their goose would have been cooked at a commercial establishment, tended by family members, and fetched home through the snow on foot when it was done. Hopefully the oven was close, because cold goose is not so very appetizing.

That pudding they all exclaimed over might have been the only time during their miserable year that they got something sweet. It would have been sweetened with brown sugar, and contained currants and raisins, as well as the peels of oranges and lemons, preserved in syrup. Oranges and lemons were a very expensive treat, and not to be wasted; not even the peel.

Their lives were spent cold. They expected it, and knew nobody for whom that was any different. More than 6 feet away from that fire, the room was uncomfortably cold. The hallways and bedrooms (if they had them) were cold, and they went outside to use an outhouse. Unheated, of course. In London, for the poor, there were probably communal outhouses.

Even the rich did not heat the hallways in their houses. They had fireplaces in their bedrooms, but they expected to be cold. Cold was their natural state. They didn't complain about it because they took it for granted.

We are so spoiled!