SOURCE: “The Incorporation of A Christmas Carol: A Tale of Seasonal Screening,” in Dickens Studies Annual, Vol. 24, 1996, pp. 93–118.

In the following essay, McCracken-Flesher judges the impact of A Christmas Carol on the economic success of Christmas.

In February 1844, just a few months after A Christmas Carol's publication, Thackeray called the book “a national benefit, and to every man or woman who reads it a personal kindness” (Collins 149). Dickens' tale certainly has proved a national benefit, but not, perhaps, as he would have hoped or as Thackeray meant. In Britian, and particularly in America, it has benefited not so much national morality, as the national economy. From Russell Baker's perspective, the germ of “the secular mass-marketing exercise that Americans celebrate nowadays” lies in “The Christmases Dickens admired Scrooge for keeping ever afterward.” “Scrooge,” Baker writes, “stood on the threshold of the modern Christmas—a ‘festival of consumption’ …—in...