What the Dickens! A Christmas Carol and the squelching of a copyright infringement

helenhall5
5 hours ago
6 min read

Professor Jane Jarman, Nottingham Law School https://www.ntu.ac.uk/staff-profiles/law/jane-jarman

Christmas is not Christmas without A Christmas Carol. The story of the notorious miser, Ebenezer Scrooge, was frightened back to moral rectitude one Christmas Eve, spooked by his old partner, Marley, and visited by three Spirits, the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come.

However, what is less well known is that within a month of publication on 19 December 1843, Dickens instructed his solicitor, Thomas Mitton, a childhood friend, to sue five booksellers and printers he accused of pirating the work.

A copyright dispute for Christmas! The perfect gift!

Publication of A Christmas Carol

A Christmas Carol was published on 19 December 1843 for 5 shillings. A first edition from the original print run of 6,000 copies will now cost considerably more. It was a very pretty book, just right for the season. However, as Martin Chuzzlewit was not exactly flying off the shelves, Dickens’s regular publishers were not keen, and he self published the work. He commissioned artwork from John Leech, and off he went to the printers.

The germ of an idea came to Dickens after giving a lecture at the Manchester Athenaeum and, in part, by the Report upon the Physical and Moral Condition of the Children and Young Persons employed in Mines and Manufactures published in April 1843, which had caused an outcry because of the terrible working conditions of so many people. The Athenaeum was established to alleviate the plight of the poor and to provide resources for education. Galvanised by his trip to Manchester, Dickens wrote the story in just over six weeks, and by the end of November 1843, the manuscript was ready.

However, whilst geese were cooked and puddings boiled, something else was afoot in the streets around Drury Lane at Christmas 1843…

Dickens v Lee [1844]

Copyright infringement was, and remains, an occupational hazard for writers. Shakespeare lost control of some of his sonnets. Alexander Pope sued the notorious bookseller Edmund Curl in Pope v Curl, establishing the first principles of copyright law. Dickens had brushed off the overt taking of his work as the price of his undoubted fame. He had been a target since The Pickwick Papers. However, something about the infringement of the Carol boiled over into legal action for Dickens – enough was enough.

Dickens issued five Bills in Chancery against five booksellers and printers on 10 and 11 January 1844 and obtained an Interim Injunction supported by an Affidavit from Dickens himself to restrain “printing, publishing, selling, or otherwise disposing of the said publication, or any continuation thereof.”

Dickens may well have criticised Chancery in Bleak House, but the pace was rapid in Dickens v Lee, especially as the new legal term had not started and the court was not sitting.

The affidavits, two sworn by Dickens himself, show that by Saturday, 6 January 1844, copies of Parley's Library were circulating, containing a Christmas Ghost Story remarkably like the Carol, albeit with a few choice changes, such as a sixty line song for Tiny Tim and an extended trip for the Cratchits' goose from the baker’s oven in Camden Town. Thomas Mitton’s Clerk, Mr Bach, was able to purchase a copy of the pirated work on Monday morning, and later the same day, the game was afoot.

Four of the five publishers went quietly into the night and must have apologised and pulped the offending fiction. One enterprise, however, that of Richard Egan Lee and John Haddock, decided to fight the action (although Haddock remained remarkably quiet).

What we know of the case owes much to the first study of the litigation that followed, Charles Dickens in Chancery. Still, we are all indebted to the author, a Mr Edward Tyrell Jaques, Esq, a Solicitor of the Supreme Court, for his diligence in scouring the Chancery records at the Public Records Office for details of the litigation.

Lee’s Defence – ‘…squelched, and utterly undone.’

The Lee and Haddock ‘defence,’ based on laches (delay) and acquiescence, although doomed from the start, was at once ingenious and delusional.

In his affidavit, Lee protested that he simply ‘did analyse, abridge, reoriginate,’ he did not copy, and the resultant work was as much his (and his staff writer, Henry Hewitt) as Dickens. It was not, in the quaint language of the day, ‘a colourable imitation of or piracy’ but a reimagining. Secondly, as Lee had sold over 70,000 copies of the Old Curiosity Shop, and Dickens had not complained about Parley's Library in the past, he had acquiesced in the conduct. Thirdly, and the cheekiest challenge of all, Dickens should be grateful because the Parley's version enhanced his standing, on the basis that all publicity is good publicity.

Hewitt, for his part, stated that he had simply ‘tastefully remedied’ some of the ‘numerous incongruities in the plot’ and that he held ‘in utter distain the copying…as his own…of the ideas and modes of expression of any author.’ It is possible to have some sympathy for this sentiment when it comes to some of Dickens’ work, but Hewitt was never going to be a contender for sub editor.

Clearly, Lee was desperate to save his business model because he also paid for expert evidence in support of his application to dissolve the injunction. Both ‘expert’ affidavits contained remarkably similar phrasing and suggested that although Parley’s Illustrated Ghost Story was ‘avowedly derived’ from the Carol, and, given the disparity in price between the two volumes, nobody would be confused.

Despite an attempt to dissolve the injunction (rather than discharge, in today’s terms), and a few procedural skirmishes, legal gravity was brutal. By the end of January 1844, according to Dickens,

‘The pirates are beaten flat. . .. They are bruised, bloody, battered, smashed, squelched, and utterly undone.’

Despite the squelching, it appears Dickens did not receive a penny from Lee for his costs.

The Irony of Dickens v Lee

There is an irony at the heart of Dickens v Lee. The Carol cost 5 bob. Bob Cratchitt only earns 15 bob a week, so it would not have been a book for a clerk like him. Lee argued that his kind of piracy promoted the social good – someone of modest means might be able to find a penny from their wages, for Parley's Library on a Saturday morning, but not the 5 shillings required for the Carol. The irony was not lost on the Vice Chancellor, Knight Bruce, who heard the case, who observed that the “value of cheap editions of works containing interesting and good information was one universally admitted.”

Still, even Dickens had to make a living.

Postscript

What of the Carol manuscript itself? At some point before 1900, it was acquired by Pierpont Morgan and found its way to the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, where the manuscript can be viewed over Christmas.

The gold lettering on the embossed leather binding states ‘Thomas Mitton, Esq.’ Dickens’s friend and solicitor. Perhaps the manuscript had been presented as a gift to Mitton as a memento of three very busy weeks in January 1844, ‘In Chancery’.

However, on the eve of 19 December 2025, 183 years after publication of the Carol, how should we break it to Dickens that it is not a hack writer who will ‘analyse, abridge, reoriginate’, but an algorithm in Palo Alto that might reimagine his work, which is now, most definitely, out of copyright. Software has already suggested changes to his text and punctuation, which I have resisted on his behalf.

What the Dickens indeed!

That said, and in the spirit of the season, I shall leave the last word to Dickens, albeit with a little editing from me, and recall that Scrooge became

‘…as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old City knew…. May that truly be said of us and all of us!’

What the Dickens! A Christmas Carol and the squelching of a copyright infringement

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