Within two weeks of the publication of A Christmas Carol, pirated editions were already on the stands. These “condensations” were little more than slight rewrites at best. Many had flat-out pirated the text. This was an ongoing situation for Dickens for most of his literary career, but soon after the book was published, he spent time and money fighting off these editions.
On January 6, 1844, Dickens instructed his lawyer Mitton, with whom he had shared that train ride so seemingly long ago, to institute chancery proceedings against Parley’s Penny Library. They had published A Christmas Ghost Story Reoriginated from the Original by Charles Dickens. Dickens soon found himself in a “world of injunctions, motions for dissolution, affidavits, vice-chancellors, and other intricate and costly legalities.”
Dickens was so obsessed and mortified he even attended one of the innumerable unauthorized dramatizations of his play being performed throughout London. “I saw the Carol last night,” he wrote to Forster of a dramatic performance at the Adelphi. “Better than usual, and Wright seems to enjoy Bob Cratchit, but heart-breaking to me. Oh Heaven! if any forecast of this was ever in my mind! Yet O. Smith was drearily better than I expected.”
But more bad news was on the doorstep. When the accountings for A Christmas Carol arrived, Dickens was horrified.
He had hoped to earn a £1,000 from the sale of the book, but the production costs—the tinted illustrations, the fancy endpapers, the gilding, etc.—had cut heavily into the profits.
“The first six thousand copies show a profit of 230 pounds!” he wrote to Forster. It was actually much less in retrospect.
Forster wrote in his biography of Dickens, “It may interest the reader, and be something of a curiosity of literature, if I give the expenses of the first edition of 6000, and of the 7000 more which constituted the five following editions, with the profit of the remaining 2000 which completed the sale of fifteen thousand.” The tables that follow are faithfully reproduced from Forster’s original writings.
1st Edition, 6000 No.
1843 |
|
|
|
|
Dec. |
|
£ |
_s._ |
_d._ |
|
Printing |
74 |
2 |
9 |
|
Paper |
89 |
2 |
0 |
|
Drawings and Engravings |
49 |
18 |
0 |
|
Two Steel Plates |
1 |
4 |
0 |
|
Printing Plates |
15 |
17 |
6 |
|
Paper for do |
7 |
12 |
0 |
|
Colouring Plates |
120 |
0 |
0 |
|
Binding |
180 |
0 |
0 |
|
Incidents and Advertising |
168 |
7 |
8 |
|
Commission |
99 |
4 |
6 |
|
|
£805 |
8 |
5 |
2nd to the 7th Edition, making 7000 Copies.
1844. |
|
|
|
|
Jan. |
|
£ |
_s._ |
_d._ |
|
Printing |
58 |
18 |
0 |
|
Paper |
103 |
19 |
0 |
|
Printing Plates |
17 |
10 |
0 |
|
Paper |
8 |
17 |
4 |
|
Colouring Plates |
140 |
0 |
0 |
|
Binding |
199 |
18 |
2 |
|
Incidents and Advertising |
83 |
5 |
8 |
|
Commission |
107 |
18 |
10 |
|
|
£720 |
7 |
0 |
“Two thousand more, represented by the last item in the subjoined balance, were sold before the close of the year, leaving a remainder of seventy copies.”
1843 |
£ |
_s._ |
_d._ |
Dec. Balance of a/c to Mr. Dickens’s credit 1844 |
186 |
16 |
7 |
Jan. to April. Do. Do. |
349 |
12 |
0 |
May to Dec. Do. Do. |
189 |
11 |
5 |
Amount of Profit on the Work |
£726 |
0 |
0 |
“But this is a chapter of disappointments,” Forster wrote. While Dickens had begrudgingly accepted Chuzzlewit’s lukewarm reception, which seemed “distant and problematical, so even the prodigious immediate success of the Christmas Carol itself was not to be an unmitigated pleasure.”
On January 10, 1844, Dickens wrote to Forster, “Such a night as I have passed! I really believed I should never get up again, until I had passed through all the horrors of a fever. I found the Carol accounts awaiting me, and they were the cause of it. The first six thousand copies show a profit of £230! And the last four will yield as much more. I had set my heart and soul upon a Thousand, clear. What a wonderful thing it is, that such a great success should occasion me such intolerable anxiety and disappointment!”
Dickens would go on to complain that Chapman and Hall had not properly advertised the book, and that they had layered in numerous charges to his accounting. Still, the sales of the book had been spectacular in such a short burst. Ironically, in December 1844, he would publish The Chimes, one of his several other Christmas writings, which sold fewer copies but netted him more than £1,500—much more than Carol.
“My year’s bills, unpaid, are so terrific,” Dickens wrote, “that all the energy and determination I can possibly exert will be required to clear me before I go abroad; which, if next June come and find me alive, I shall do. Good Heaven, if I had only taken heart a year ago! Do come soon, as I am very anxious to talk with you. We can send round to Mac after you arrive, and tell him to join us at Hampstead or elsewhere. I was so utterly knocked down last night, that I came up to the contemplation of all these things quite bold this morning. If I can let the house for this season, I will be off to some seaside place as soon as a tenant offers. I am not afraid, if I reduce my expenses; but if I do not, I shall be ruined past all mortal hope of redemption.”
“And indeed this was his panic and fear: the fear of ruin, of being thrust down again into poverty, to go the way of his father into a debtors’ prison, all the success and fame he has achieved to be stripped from him as he is cast back into the state of childhood,” wrote Ackroyd with keen insight. “There must have been times when it seemed to him that all his achievement was a dream, and that he would wake up once again in Bayham Street or the little attic room of Lant Street. There was still so much fear behind the bright appearance of the eminent novelist.”
But Dickens was not done tinkering with A Christmas Carol. No, the tinkering had just begun.