The Man Who Invented Christmas

How Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits

By: Les Standiford

Narrated by: Jonathan Davis

Length: 5 hrs and 50 mins

Publisher's summary

As uplifting as the tale of Scrooge itself, this is the story of how Charles Dickens revived the signal holiday of the Western world.

Just before Christmas in 1843, a debt-ridden and dispirited Charles Dickens wrote a small book he hoped would keep his creditors at bay. His publisher turned it down, so Dickens used what little money he had to put out A Christmas Carol himself. He worried it might be the end of his career as a novelist.

The book immediately caused a sensation. And it breathed new life into a holiday that had fallen into disfavor, undermined by lingering Puritanism and the cold modernity of the Industrial Revolution. It was a harsh and dreary age, in desperate need of spiritual renewal, ready to embrace a book that ended with blessings for one and all.

With warmth, wit, and an infusion of Christmas cheer, Les Standiford whisks us back to Victorian England, its most beloved storyteller, and the birth of the Christmas we know best. The Man Who Invented Christmas is a rich and satisfying listen for Scrooges and sentimentalists alike.

©2008 Les Standiford (P)2017 Audible, Inc.

Interesting history of a great author

I'm a fan of history and of Charles Dickens so this was a very interesting story about the author's life and the way things were back then. I love the movie so having more backstory is great.

Getting to know Dickens

I very much enjoyed this background work on The Christmas Carol. However, the story of Dickens own redemption is so well woven in with "the Carol's" origin it is hard to see where one ends and the other begins. To me, that was a joy in listening to this. I commute about an hour for work; so during the holidays it was nice to have a scholarly yet holiday related work to listen to. If you've ever wanted to as the Ghost of Christmas Present states " ...come here and know me better man." This book will do the job.

Enjoyable Book

I learned a lot about both Christmas and Charles Dickens. The first hour and a half was a little slow, but necessary for the rest of the book. The performance was good, and I enjoyed it. For me, it was wonderful to hear how Dickens wrote, and understood his Christmas Carol. So much of our culture changed as a consequence of this book, and this author. Wonderful opportunity to learn about this holiday and us.

A great historical Christmas listen

I really enjoyed this take on Charles dickens life! It was a great story to listen to while preparing for the Christmas season! The reader was good, just wasn’t my favorite! Thanks for a great story!

Better Than the Movie that I fell Asleep During

A quick but enjoyable listen. For those looking for more of the history surrounding and context to the creation of Dickens's beloved Holiday classic; this is your book!

If you are simply looking for a novelization of the Hollywood film, then you might want to go elsewhere...then again, I fell asleep while watching the movie, so maybe I am not the best judge of how close it follows the book.

But let's be serious. if you're actually reading this, you're the type of person that knows that the book is better.

Great Story with a few audio issues.

I liked this story well enough, as it is basically an account of Charles Dicken's life and how he came to make A Christmas Carol, and how it influenced so many people in and after his lifetime.

Yet, I did have some problems with the production. For the first time I have encountered, this audible production had issues such as pieces of audio that you can tell were added later. I cannot tell if this is because they made a mistake while recording one day and had to re-record lines, or what, but there are times when the narrator speaks one or two sentences with a noticeably different audio quality to them. This does bring it down for me.

Overall, this was a good book if you want to know more about Dicken's famous tale.

Great book!!

Except that the reader couldn’t decide if the book was about Dickens ot Dickinson..the story was well written and well read.

Too much about publishing

Expected it to be more about the evolution of the modern Christmas and Dickens' role in that. Instead it was a biography of Dickens with emphasis on his writing career and his publishing trials. There was a main focus in the publishing industry, how and in what manner Dickens published his works and what money he got for writing what. There's only really one chapter about A Christmas Carol and one chapter about its part in the evolution modern Christmas culture. Other reviews have said as much but I hoped it was an excess of needless information with kernels of relevance. But cut away the publishing info and there isn't much in the book. I'm disappointed and didn't learn much. Looking to read The Battle for Christmas next for the type of book I expected to find here.

More Scholarly than Entertaining

I do NOT mean to criticize scholarly writing here. This book is thoroughly researched and covers its topic broadly and fairly deeply. Nevertheless, I confess to having purchased it in search of something that would somehow better reflect the warmth and charm of its subject. Like many of the works of Dickens, who was paid by the word, this work could have been twenty percent shorter and gotten to its point more quickly.
The narrator is very professional (despite the occasional mispronunciation). Perhaps a British narrator might have felt more appropriate for the subject, but i can hardly fault this gentleman for that. I WAS distracted by the obvious changes in audio quality for the many segments where he was obviously called back to the studio (perhaps a different studio?) to re-read portions that must have contained errors.
Despite these gripes, I appreciate the context this author has provided to Dickens' beloved tale, and I'm pleased to understand more about the life, times, and circumstances of Charles Dickens before, during, and after his creation of "A Christmas Carol".

Concise Summary . . .

I don't think I've realized ALL the books Charles Dickens is responsible for until listening to this. A Christmas Story is the most obvious/popular of his books - and my favorite - but I didn't realize he was the author of so many others that are considered classics today.

4.25 stars