By the time Dickens travelled back to London, he knew he needed to write something monumentally important. The first known mention of A Christmas Carol is in a letter to Scottish academic Macvey Napier, on 24 October: “I plunged headlong into a little scheme ...[and] set an artist at work upon it.” The artist was Dickens’s great friend John Leech, who would become famous as one of the leading cartoonists for Punch.

Christmas yet to come

Dickens spent six weeks writing. He finished the novella on 2 December, but instead of being relieved, he was stressed and panicking about finances. His bank account was overdrawn and his publishers, Chapman and Hall, were unsupportive of what they considered a strange idea. His current novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, had lost readers during its serialisation, and the publishers were losing confidence in their star author. As a result they refused to pay the full costs for publishing A Christmas Carol, so Dickens paid the rest himself. Now the book was finished, Dickens was furious at how little effort Chapman and Hall were making to publicise it. They came to regret their lack of confidence: A Christmas Carol was an instant and overwhelming success, and in 1844, Charles Dickens moved to rival publishing house Bradbury and Evans.