A Christmas Carol In Nineteenth-Century America, 1844-1870

Bibliographic Data

ID3852171
AuthorsTony R Smith (0000-0002-9177-9536, University of East Anglia, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume20
Issue3-4
Pages205-229
Publication date2023-10-02
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueComparative American Studies An International Journal (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1477-5700 • E-ISSN: 1741-2676
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/14775700.2023.2229214
OpenAlexW4385359766
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited16

Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol retains a profound presence in Transatlantic seasonal celebrations and the popular image of the festive period. While the book’s reception in the United Kingdom has been well studied, its early progress through nineteenth-century American popular culture has received much less attention and existing accounts of its rise to popularity are contradictory. This article, therefore, is an attempt to trace the ways that American readers and audiences responded to this defining Transatlantic text in the decades between its first publication and Dickens’s death in 1870. After exploring its immediate reception in the wake of its first publication in America, I examine the changing status of A Christmas Carol in relation to both Dickens’s American reading tour of 1867-8 and the aftermath of his death - finding the book, throughout those decades, to be a crucial arbiter of both the popular idea of Christmas and the reputation of Dickens and his work more broadly

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Literature · Media studies · Period (music · Political science · Popular culture · Popularity · Reading (process · Reception theory · Relation (database · Reputation · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Law · Philosophy

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