Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol

Every holiday season, the Morgan displays Charles Dickens’s original manuscript of A Christmas Carol in J. Pierpont Morgan's Library. Dickens wrote his iconic tale in a six-week flurry of activity beginning in October 1843 and ending in time for Christmas publication. He had the manuscript bound in red goatskin leather as a gift for his solicitor, Thomas Mitton. The manuscript then passed through several owners before Pierpont Morgan acquired it in the 1890s.

Each year the Christmas Carol manuscript is advanced by one page. This year’s passage opens mid-sentence, with Scrooge’s realization that the knocker on his front door appears to be “not a knocker, but Marley’s face.” The visage of his deceased business partner, Jacob Marley, “had a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar.” Horrified by Marley’s open yet “perfectly motionless” eyes, Scrooge stares at the spectral knocker until it resumes its natural shape, and with a “Pooh Pooh!” dismisses the vision of Marley before ascending the broad stairway to his bedroom. Here Scrooge seems to hallucinate “a locomotive hearse going on before him in the gloom,” but it is hard to see in the dim light shed by his inexpensive candle; as the narrator comments, “darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it.” Having not completely shaken his fear of the ghastly encounter, Scrooge “walked through his rooms to see that all was right.”

Explore Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol online and view other related highlights from the collection.

Share in the festivities with your own copy of A Christmas Carol available from the Morgan Shop. This is the first-ever trade edition of Charles Dickens's "own and only" manuscript of his classic and beloved story. It contains a facsimile of the original manuscript of A Christmas Carol, published in full-color, with a foreword by Colm Tóibín and introduction by Declan Kiely.