That old festival had involved days of drunkenness, revelry and misrule, but the proprietors of the new cotton mills and ironworks were hardly likely to start handing out 12-day holidays to their workforce. As Christmas became squeezed into a single day, there must have been a profound sense of dislocation, a bafflement as to how to transform that bucolic Christmas Past into a welcoming Christmas Present.
Then, a week before Christmas in 1843, a book appeared that would reinvent the celebration: A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. Catering to the public's craving for ghost stories, it sold an astonishing 6,000 copies in a week - a figure that even today would place it near the top of the bestseller lists.
The book was a triumph in at least two respects. First, it successfully revised memories of the past. Out went the real Christmas of yore, with its misrule, its riotous edge. In came a new, airbrushed Christmas. To quote Scrooge's nephew: "I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time […] as 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 people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave."
Read the rest of Harry Bingham's article on how the British (make that Charles Dickens) invented the modern Christmas celebration.
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