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INTRODUCTION. |
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book of two hundred pages, in paper one shilling and nine-pence and in cloth half-a-crown.
The original manuscript of the Carol was given by Charles Dickens to Mr. Mitton, his old schoolfellow and solicitor, and, to quote Mr. W. R. Hughes' Week's Tramp in Dickensland, "was for sale in Birmingham a few years ago, and might have been purchased for two hundred and fifty guineas. It is now owned by Mr. Stuart M. Samuel, and has since been very beautifully produced in facsimile, with an introduction by my friend and fellow-tramp, Mr. F. G. Kitton." Mr. Hughes seems, however, not to be quite accurate on this point. Mr. Wright, of Paris, informs me that " Harvey, the bookseller of St. James's Street, bought the manuscript at Sotheby and Hodge's rooms on the 27th of May, 1875, for £55, and he resold it to Sir S. Samuel."
The Carol was pirated in more than one quarter, and led to proceedings in the Court of Chancery which caused Charles Dickens, although he was successful—with the trifling drawback of being unable to get any costs out of the defendants— almost as much vexation and disappointment as the accounts of the first edition brought to him. "I shall not easily forget the expense and anxiety, and horrible injustice of the Carol case," he wrote afterwards, when there was a question whether he ought not to take proceedings in another case, " wherein in asserting the plainest right on earth, I was really treated as if I were the robber instead of the robbed. . . . And I know of nothing that could come, even of a successful action, which would be worth the mental trouble and disturbance it would cost."
So late as 1869 one of these imitations was published under the title " Christmas Eve with the Spirits, or the Canon's Wanderings through Ways Unknown."
A peculiar interest, apart from purely literary considerations, attaches to the Carol. A reading of it, for the benefit of the new Midland Institute, in the Birmingham Town Hall, on the 27th of December, 1853, was the first of those platform appearances as an interpreter of his own books which were to play so important a part in Charles Dickens's later life.
Little adapted as the Carol would seem to be for dramatic representation, it found its way on to the stages both of the
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