Books: Dickens found joy in ‘A Christmas Carol’
After years of writing feverishly, Charles Dickens desperately needed a break from his demanding schedule and money to finance a year abroad.
England's best-known author hoped "A Christmas Carol," a tale about ghosts haunting the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge, would be his ticket to a yearlong Italian vacation for him, his wife, five children and servants.
"He lived very lavishly. He entertained very lavishly. ... Money was a concern," said Michael Slater, a London-based scholar and author of a new Dickens biography from Yale University Press.
But Dickens also had a nobler motivation. During "the hungry 1840s," rural people crowded into urban tenements and children worked under frightful conditions in factories and mines.