After years of writing feverishly, Charles Dickens desperately needed a break from his demanding schedule and money to finance a year abroad.

England's best-known author hoped "A Christmas Carol," a tale about ghosts haunting the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge, would be his ticket to a year-long Italian vacation for him, his wife, five children and servants.

"He lived very lavishly. He entertained very lavishly. ... Money was a concern," said Michael Slater, a London-based scholar and author of a new Dickens biography due out Tuesday from Yale University Press.

But Dickens also had a nobler motivation. During "the hungry 1840s," rural people crowded into urban tenements and children worked under frightful conditions in factories and mines.

These reports struck a hypersensitive nerve because Dickens' childhood and education were interrupted at age 11 when his father was thrown in debtors' prison for several months. He wound up working in a shoe polish factory pasting labels on bottles and surviving on six shillings a week.

"He felt so abandoned and desolate and betrayed and the future seemed so hopeless," said Dr. Slater, emeritus professor of Victorian literature at Birkbeck College at the University of London. "His schooling had been broken off. He thought his life was lost forever."

Of that time in his life, Dickens later wrote, "For any care that was taken of me, I could have become a little robber or a little vagabond."

One night, after speaking in Manchester, a town known for its coal mines and factories, the now-famous author had an idea:

"He would write a story which would highlight concern for the poor man's child. ... Tiny Tim stood for all poor children in Britain," said Dr. Slater, author of "Charles Dickens: A Life Defined by Writing," and six other books about the 18th-century British novelist.

Dickens insisted on hiring John Leech to draw the illustrations and a whole group of women to hand-color them, both major expenses.

Released just in time for Christmas 1843, "A Christmas Carol" was an enormous hit. But financially, it was a bitter disappointment.

"Profits to him, despite the enormous sales, were really quite moderate," Dr. Slater said.

The first 6,000 copies gave Dickens a profit of 230 pounds. In today's dollars that figure would be $28,000, according to the Web site www.measuringworth.com.

Dickens wrote to his friend, John Forster, that he had "set my heart and soul upon a thousand (pounds) clear," which is equivalent to about $121,000 today.

Nevertheless, Dickens "didn't see any contradiction between huge disappointment over the financial rewards of this work and great delight in the happiness that he gave to people and the effect that it had," Dr. Slater said.

What amazed the scholar is how Dickens managed to write a 200-page Christmas story while producing 32-page, regular installments of a serialized novel called "The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit" plus topical journalism and public speeches.

"He wrote 'A Christmas Carol' in the space of two or three weeks, from conceiving it to completing it," he said.

Dickens' classic tale has been republished many times since and made into movies, including the Disney version released last week. Professor John O. Jordan, director of The Dickens Project at the University of California in Santa Cruz, said that by writing "A Christmas Carol," Dickens contributed "to the modern idea of Christmas as a family celebration, moving it out of church and into the middle-class home."

Traditionally, Christmas in England was celebrated at the large manor house with servants gathering around the Yule log, he said.

After the success of "A Christmas Carol," Dickens regularly wrote a seasonal tale. His other Christmas works were "The Chimes," "The Cricket on the Hearth," "The Battle of Life" and "The Haunted Man." But none ever received the acclaim of his first holiday tale, or quite matched its hopeful message.

"At the heart of 'A Christmas Carol' is the experience of the change of heart, a conversion, if you will, from Scrooge the miser to Scrooge the benevolent patriarch," Dr. Jordan said.

"Everyone responds powerfully to the idea, the possibility, that in midlife or late in life, one can still change and be a better person."

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