A Christmas Carol

Charles Dickens was born in Portsea in 1812, the son of John and Elizabeth Dickens. His father worked for the Navy Pay Office and for several years Charles enjoyed a happy childhood. These happy times did not last and when he was ten years old his family moved to London. His parents always had money problems and they sent Charles to work in a factory when he was twelve years old. [...]

Scrooge

Marley’s Ghost

In northern countries like Great Britain, Christmas is traditionally a time for ghosts. People sit round a big fire and tell ghost stories. In the sixteenth century two skulls1 appeared every Christmas Day at Calgarth Hall in the English Lake District. Myles Phillipson, a magistrate, built Calgarth Hall on some land ­– but it wasn’t his land. It belonged to a man called Kraster Cook, who lived in a cottage with his wife, Dorothy. [...]

The First Spirit

The Christmas Story

The Second Spirit

The Last of the Spirits

During the 1840s London quickly became a very big city. In 1850 there were a quarter of a million more people than in 1840. In the area of St Giles 2,850 people lived in only 95 small houses – about 30 people in each house! In these poor areas, conditions were terrible. The streets were very dirty, and people drank and cooked with bad water from the River Thames. In 1847, 500,000 people died of typhus fever in one month. [...]

Let’s find some more information about some of the places described in the dossier London in Dickens’ Time.

‘A Merry Christmas, Mr Scrooge!’

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