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Books tell us about our world and are often inspired by things that happen in it. But books have the power to shape reality, too: they can be magical objects with that change behaviour, start trends and establish traditions.
Did you know that we wish each other merry Christmas because of a book? And that this same book gave us the idea of Christmas spirit?
The book in question is A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.
As he sat at his desk writing this ghost story in the autumn of 1843, Dickens was deep in debt: perhaps that’s why he created the mean and miserly old man named Ebenezer Scrooge, a character forced to confront the negative consequences of his actions by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come.
The story was – and still is – extraordinarily successful. Since first publication on 19 December 1843, it has never been out of print. Translated into dozens of languages and adapted into films, cartoons, plays and more, the novel has done much to influence the very meaning of Christmas in our collective imagination.
Today, we tell the story of A Christmas Carol through the most interesting and eye-catching covers to Dickens’s masterpiece.
Beware the Ghosts of Christmas!
The first edition’s (not very Christmassy) cover
Just a year after its initial release, 13 editions of A Christmas Carol had already been published, including a pirated edition! Despite being an instant bestseller, it was not all plane sailing from the start for Dickens’s tale.
A case in point: as often happens, the author was not happy with the graphic design for the first edition. Dickens expected a festive feel with bright green flyleaves.
However, the book produced by publishers Chapman and Hall sorely disappointed the author, aesthetically at least: instead of bright green, the endpapers were a drab olive colour. In an attempt to remedy things, the publishers changed the colour of the endpapers to bright yellow. The cover was bound in red cloth with golden lettering.
Covers with Christmas tropes
Fortunately, Dickens didn’t have to wait long to see his novel in more festive attire. In fact, A Christmas Carol would help to establish many of the symbols that we today associate with Christmas.
The book was written in the Victorian era, a time when the middle class was flourishing. At Christmastime, well-to-do homes began displaying festive symbols, chief among them an evergreen tree decorated for the occasion.
Below is a series of A Christmas Carol covers illustrated with icons, symbols and images that are decidedly more seasonal!
An elegant mistletoe pattern adorns this edition published by Peter Pauper Press in the fifties.
A contrasting yet equally festive early-20th-century design. Holly, bells and snow feature on this magnificent cover for Hodder and Stoughton’s 1911 edition illustrated by Arthur Cadwgan Michael.
Two contemporary covers with classic Christmas tree imagery.
Another traditional Christmas symbol, the snow flake, graces the covers of two different editions of A Christmas Carol published by Penguin. The artwork on the left is by illustrator Ellie Curtis, who a produced a series of superb covers for reprints of six Dickens novels.
Covers with Scrooge, the quintessential miser
For A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens created a character who is the epitome of stinginess and greed. A person corrupted by a lifetime of selfishness and unscrupulousness. A man with total disregard for those around him. Someone who has lost sight of life’s beauty. In fact, so perfectly did Dickens flesh out this character that his very name has become synonymous with miserliness in the English language.
That character, of course, is Scrooge – and he appears on countless covers of A Christmas Carol. Which makes it fascinating to see how depictions of Scrooge have changed down the decades.
Back in 1915, for an edition printed in London by William Heinemann and illustrated by Arthur Rackham, the cover art mocks Scrooge by turning his face into a door knocker decked in holly. It certainly made us chuckle.
The scowling brow – furrowed by a lifetime of suspicion and exploitation – recurs on more recent covers, like this one from 1979. Published in the United States by Viking, it’s almost a caricature of Scrooge.
Often, the old curmudgeon is shown in the presence of a Ghost of Christmas, being confronted with the consequences of his actions. That’s the case for this Spanish-language edition, which uses one of Rackham’s eerily evocative illustrations.
First embittered by life, then mellowed by the Ghosts of Christmas. The change in Scrooge’s character can be illustrated by comparing covers from different times and places. Below, left we have a contemporary cover illustrated by Argentine artist Juan Pablo Caro for publishers Buenos Aires Aique; and on the right we have an older cover with yet another drawing of Scrooge by Arthur Rackham.
Very often, Scrooge is portrayed wearing a top hat, regardless of the style, era or country of publication. Indeed, for many, this item alone now conjures up images of the character.
More top hats!
Covers in Christmas green
Along with red and gold, green is a Christmas colour laden with meaning, which is why it frequently features on A Christmas Carol cover art. In Celtic tradition, green was used in winter months to celebrate the imminent return of spring and life, while in the Bible, green and red symbolise the life of Jesus.
As we explained earlier, Dickens himself wanted the first edition of A Christmas Carol to have festive green endpapers. So he would no doubt have been delighted to see the many verdant covers published since!
Two such covers particularly caught our eye. The first, released by Bodleian Library Publishing in 2023, is a sumptuous deluxe edition with Arthur Rackham’s classic illustrations and a superb cover on which the silhouettes of Scrooge and a Ghost of Christmas are set against a forest green background (left). The second is a collection of Charles Dickens’s Christmas stories published by Canterbury Classics in 2013 (right). This hunter-green cover is emblazoned with a berry red title and series of key quotes and phrases from the novel in tonal green lettering.
A Christmas Carol covers from around the world
For nigh on two centuries, Charles Dickens’s Christmas classic has gripped readers young and old around the world. So we’ve put together a selection of the most interesting covers from international editions. We start with this cover to an Italian edition of A Christmas Carol, published by Garzanti in 2016 and featuring another traditional festive symbol: the snowman.
A German edition published by Verlag der Nation in 1988. The cover art depicts Scrooge in his customary top hat .
A terrified Scrooge is front and centre on this cover for a French edition of A Christmas Carol published in 1996 by Librio.
The cover to this modern Portuguese edition of A Christmas Carol, published by Europa-America, shows Scrooge flying above a snow-covered London alongside a Ghost of Christmas. In an interesting little detail, Big Ben is shown under construction in the background. This is historically accurate, too: the iconic clock tower was indeed being built at the time A Christmas Carol was first published.
Rather unusually, this 2014 Bulgarian edition has Charles Dickens on the cover, instead of a character from the novel.
Although Dickens’s tale is of a Christian festival, it has a power that transcends religious and cultural barriers. Here’s a stunning cover from an Arabic edition of A Christmas Carol published by Jasmine House.
And another from a Farsi edition.
We conclude our cover collection in the far east with a paperback Japanese edition published in 2011.
And another in Chinese.
We’ve no doubt that the Ghosts of Christmas will continue setting the Scrooges of the world on the right path, and that there are many more splendid covers for this tale to come. What’s your favourite A Christmas Carol cover?