{"product_id":"the-man-who-invented-christmas-isbn-9780307405791","title":"The Man Who Invented Christmas","description":"\u003cb\u003eAs uplifting as the tale of Scrooge itself, this is the story of how Charles Dickens revived the signal holiday of the Western world—now a major motion picture. \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Just before Christmas  in 1843, a debt-ridden and dispirited Charles Dickens wrote a small book he hoped  would keep his creditors at bay. His publisher turned it down, so Dickens used what  little money he had to put out \u003ci\u003eA Christmas Carol\u003c\/i\u003e himself. He worried it might be  the end of his career as a novelist.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The book immediately caused a sensation. And  it breathed new life into a holiday that had fallen into disfavor, undermined by  lingering Puritanism and the cold modernity of the Industrial Revolution. It was  a harsh and dreary age, in desperate need of spiritual renewal, ready to embrace  a book that ended with blessings for one and all.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e With warmth, wit, and an infusion  of Christmas cheer, Les Standiford whisks us back to Victorian England, its most  beloved storyteller, and the birth of the Christmas we know best. \u003ci\u003eThe Man Who Invented  Christmas\u003c\/i\u003e is a rich and satisfying read for Scrooges and sentimentalists alike.“In this small but remarkable book, Les Standiford offers readers a gift for all seasons. Carefully researched and written in a stately, lucid prose, this book will be cherished by those who love Dickens, enjoy Christmas, or ponder the endless mysteries of human behavior.” \u003cbr\u003e—Roland Merullo, author of \u003ci\u003eAmerican Savior\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A wonderfully absorbing and revealing account, full of things I did not realize about \u003ci\u003eA Christmas Carol\u003c\/i\u003e, Charles Dickens, and the world of publishing. Once I started reading this book, truly, I could not put it down.”\u003cbr\u003e—Dan Wakefield, author of \u003ci\u003eNew York in the Fifties\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eThe Man Who Invented Christmas\u003c\/i\u003e is destined to be a classic about a classic. As Tiny Tim might say, ‘God Bless Everyone,’ in this case Standiford, for creating such a delightful and engaging gem—part history, part literary analysis, and all heart, just like the book that inspired it.” \u003cbr\u003e—Madeleine Blais, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and author of \u003ci\u003eUphill Walkers\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eLes Standiford\u003c\/b\u003e is the author of ten critically acclaimed novels as well as several works of nonfiction including \u003ci\u003eLast Train to Paradise, The Man Who Invented Christmas, Meet You in Hell,\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eWashington Burning\u003c\/i\u003e. He has received the Frank O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is founding director of the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami and was appointed holder of the Peter Meinke Chair in Creative Writing at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg. He lives in Pinecrest, Florida, with his wife and three children.\u003cb\u003eNativity\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn London, in 1824, it was the custom to treat a debtor little differently from a man who had reached into a purse and stolen a similar sum. In this case, he was a father of seven, and though he was gainfully employed, it was not gainful enough. His debt was to a baker, a man named Karr, who lived in Camden Street, and the sum was forty pounds, no small amount in those days, when an oyster was a penny, a whole salmon a pound and six, and a clerk who worked for a tightfisted miser in a countinghouse might not earn as much in a year.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAccounts were tallied, the sheriff was consulted, and men were sent in consequence. Our father—John his name, and thirty-seven—was taken by the sheriff’s men to what was called a “spong­ing house,” a kind of purgatory where those who could not meet their obligations were afforded some few days to seek relief from their creditors’ charges, intervention from a person of influence, or possibly a loan from family or friends.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn this instance, help was not forthcoming. Two days passed with no good word, and then our John, officially an insolvent debtor, was passed along to the Marshalsea, imprisoned alongside smugglers, mutineers, and pirates. “The sun has set on me, forever,” he told his family as he left.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne who tried to help was a son of John, who, then twelve, took a job, at six shillings a week in a tumbledown ­factory-house that sat on the banks of the River Thames. One day long afterward the boy would speak of the place, “Its wainscoted rooms and its rotten floors and staircase, and the old grey rats swarming down in the cellars, and the sound of their squeaking and scuffing coming up the stairs at all times, and the dirt and decay of the place, rise up visibly before me, as if I were there again.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHis job was to fill small pots with shoe blacking, and tie them off with paper, and then to paste on each a printed label. The boy worked ten hours a day, standing near a window for better light and where any passersby might see him, with a break for a meal at noon, and one for tea later on. And though the place was grim and the work was numbing, and this had put his childhood to an end, he worked on. For his father was in prison. For a debt of forty pounds. For his family’s bread.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“My whole nature was so penetrated with the grief and humiliation of such considerations,” the boy would one day write, “that even now . . . I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children; even that I am a man; and [I] wander desolately back to that time of my life.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhile these words testify to the force of a childhood blow, they also offer reassurance that there would one day come a lightening of his circumstances. That the boy would not spend forever in his dismal occupation, nor would his father stay forever in the Marshalsea, though there were three long months there, with our young man visiting his father in a tiny room behind high spiked walls, and where, the boy recalls, they “cried very much.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd where his father told him “to take warning by the Marshalsea, and to observe that if a man had twenty pounds a year, and spent nineteen pounds nineteen shillings and sixpence, he would be happy; but that a shilling spent the other way would make him wretched.” These words of caution, and lament, and more, and then at 10:00 p.m. the warning bell would toll and our young man of twelve would walk out into the foggy London night, five miles toward home, and some hours of oblivion before the scurrying, and the squealing, and the little pots of blacking came again.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e* * *\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe boy’s name was Charles, of course, and his family’s name was Dickens, and most who have commented on the life of the famed author have ob­served that those sorry experiences of his youth, described in a scrap of autobiography never published during his lifetime, constitute the most sig­nificant of his formative years. All art grows out of its maker’s loss, it has been said—and if that is so, Dickens’s loss of his childhood was to become the world’s great gain.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDickens, who is generally considered one of the most ­ac­complished writers in the English language, published twenty novels in his lifetime—he died in 1870—and none of them has ever gone out of print. His personal experience of harsh working conditions and a deep sympathy for the poor inform much of his writing, and more than one scholar has made a life’s work out of tracing the parallels between the ­author’s life and his fiction. The number of academic books, dissertations, monographs, and articles devoted to Dickens and such lengthy works as\u003ci\u003e Oliver Twist\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eDavid Copperfield\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eBleak House\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eGreat Expectations\u003c\/i\u003e, is, practically speaking, beyond counting.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut perhaps the best known and certainly the most be­loved of all Dickens’s works has received relatively little study. Though \u003ci\u003eA Christmas Carol\u003c\/i\u003e abounds in references to Dickens’s life, and is the very apotheosis of his themes—and though it is exquisitely crafted, often referred to as his most “perfect” work—critical attention has been scant.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePerhaps it is because the book is short, fewer than 30,000 words; perhaps it is because of its very popularity, its readership said at the turn of the twentieth century to be second only to the Bible’s; or perhaps it is because of the difficulty or the irrele­vance of analyzing what is simply very good. Dickens’s contemporary, William Makepeace Thackeray, as scathing a critic as ever walked the streets of London, once said of it, “Who can listen to objections regarding such a book as this? It seems to me a national benefit, and to every man or woman who reads it, a personal kindness.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePerhaps the most surprising thing about the story behind this well-known story, however, is the pivotal role it played both in Dickens’s career and in cultural history itself. At the time he sat down to write his “slender volume,” Dickens’s once unequaled popularity was at a nadir, his critical reputation in a shambles, his bank account overdrawn.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFaced with bankruptcy, he was contemplating giving up on writing fiction altogether. Instead, he pulled himself ­together and, in six short weeks, wrote a book that not only restored him in the eyes of the public but began the transformation of what was then a second-tier holiday into the most significant celebration of the Christian calendar.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHowever, as many an old storyteller has put it, we have gotten a bit ahead of ourselves.","brand":"Crown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300733800677,"sku":"NP9780307405791","price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780307405791.jpg?v=1767740396","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-man-who-invented-christmas-isbn-9780307405791","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}