Johnson is a major Dickens scholar whose Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph (1952) is considered the definitive biography of the novelist. In the following essay adapted from that work, Johnson expounds on the social importance of A Christmas Carol.

Everyone knows Dickens' Christmas Carol for its colorful painting of a rosy fireside good cheer and warmth of feeling, made all the more vivid by the contrasting chill wintry darkness in which its radiant scenes are framed. Most readers realize too how characteristic of all Dickens' sentiments about the Christmas season are the laughter and tenderness and jollity he poured into the Carol. What is not so widely understood is that it was also consistently and deliberately created as a critical blast against the very rationale of industrialism and its assumptions about the organizing principles of society. It is an attack upon both the economic behavior of...