By 2 January, a second edition of 3,000 had been issued. ‘Hurrah, say I,’ Dickens wrote. The first edition of 6,000 copies had sold out by Christmas Eve. ‘Charles Dickens wept, and laughed, and wept again … in the composition’, Dickens wrote of himself, ‘and thinking whereof, he walked about the black streets of London, fifteen and twenty miles, many a night when all the sober folks had gone to bed.’ All this while ‘pegging away, tooth and nail’ at the monthly serialisation of Martin Chuzzlewit. Once started, A Christmas Carol took him over. ‘I have very seldom seen, in all the strange and dreadful things I have seen … anything so shocking,’ he wrote. Then, in September, Dickens visited the Ragged School for destitute children near Saffron Hill. ‘You will certainly feel that a Sledge hammer has come down with … twenty thousand times the force I could exert by following out my first idea,’ he said. Four days later, his thinking had changed. On 6 March Dickens offered to write a pamphlet before year’s end ‘on behalf of the Poor Man’s Child’. The volume, published by Chapman and Hall on 19 December 1843, was an immediate success and the initial print run of 6,000 copies sold out within a matter of days. The answer seems to be a report from the Children’s Employment Commission, published in February 1843. A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas, to give the work its full title, was the first, and the most popular, of Dickens’s series of Christmas books. But where did A Christmas Carol begin for Charles Dickens? by the first Artists in Paris, under the superintendence of Mr. ‘Marley was dead: to begin with.’ It is perhaps the finest opening to a ghost story. A NEW AND SPLENDID EDITION OF THE MYSTERIES OF PARIS, ADAPTED TO THE.
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