A Forgotten Louisa May Alcott Story Showcases the Author's Twist on Charles Dickens' 'A Christmas Carol'

Written in 1882, “A Christmas Dream, and How It Came True,” covered many of the same themes as Dickens’ classic, albeit with a different audience in mind

By 1882, Louisa May Alcott didn’t really need to write anymore.

Alcott had been the primary breadwinner for her family since her teenage years, but the days when she had to seize every job she could find just for the cash were long gone. Now 49, the American author had achieved what most writers only dream of: She was famous and wealthy beyond belief. (By the time of her death in 1888, Alcott had sold more than one million copies of her books, grossing around $200,000 in royalties, or nearly $7 million in today’s dollars.)

The writer’s most famous novel, Little Women, was largely responsible for her astronomical success. Published in two volumes in 1868 and 1869, it was already beloved the world over, much like its author. All of the menial tasks Alcott had shouldered when she was young were a thing of the past: doing other people’s laundry and sewing, teaching (which she hated), serving as a “companion” to a wealthy family that forced her to perform difficult housework.

Freed from financial worries, Alcott continued writing for other reasons, some of which remain unclear. In October 1882, with Christmas approaching, the author recorded a $125 payment in her diary for a short story she had written, which she referred to only as “St. N tale.” The work in question, titled “A Christmas Dream, and How It Came True,” was a story that Alcott didn’t need to write, sent out into a world that has virtually forgotten it ever existed. The question, on both counts, is why.

How A Christmas Carol inspired Alcott’s short story

“A Christmas Dream” is something of an enigma. To begin with, the broad strokes of the narrative might sound oddly familiar to people today, even if they haven’t actually read or even heard of it. Why is this lost story so recognizable? It was based on, and directly engages with, a more famous work: Charles Dickens’ classic 1843 novella, A Christmas Carol.

Alcott’s story, however, is a children’s version of Dickens’ tale, which offered insightful social commentary to its Victorian-era adult readers. The composition also contrasts somewhat starkly with Alcott’s most famous work. While the first line of Little Women sees heroine Jo March grumble that it “won’t be Christmas without any presents,” the protagonist of “A Christmas Dream,” a 10-year-old girl named Effie, doesn’t have that problem. The story opens with Effie’s mother wrapping her endless gifts in the days leading up to Christmas. Effie complains that she’s bored of the holiday because she’s spoiled and always gets everything she wants.

Jan Turnquist, executive director of Orchard House, the family home in Concord, Massachusetts, where Alcott and her sisters grew up, says the contrast between Effie and Jo underscores a major theme that runs through most of the author’s works. “She was always fascinated by that dichotomy between those who have too much and those who have so little,” Turnquist explains.

This fascination plays out in “A Christmas Dream.” Effie, like Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge, undergoes a magical transformation in her feelings about the holiday. One night, after reading A Christmas Carol, Effie is whisked away in a dream by a Yuletide spirit who takes her to the “Christmas world,” a magical place where “little spirits [sew] like mad on warm clothes” for children, dolls come to life, Christmas bells peal and multiple Santa Clauses load up their sleighs to deliver gifts.

The Christmas world, as Effie learns, isn’t simply Santa’s workshop—and the spirits aren’t there solely to gift presents. They also have the power to inspire kindness and generosity toward those who are less fortunate. As Effie walks through this other world, she watches the spirits sharing good tidings with others: “The rich had generous thoughts sent them. … Children had more love and duty to parents, and parents renewed patience, wisdom and satisfaction for and in their children. No one was forgotten.”

Effie notices that the reanimated dolls improve “upon the manners and customs of human beings” by treating each other with kindness in a way that real people often don’t. Though Effie used to regard Santa as a “humbug”—an echo of Scrooge’s famous line—she comes to realize that the teams of Santa Clauses in this magical world symbolize “a lovely truth”: the beauty of giving.

Finally, like the ghost of Christmas Present, who sparks Scrooge’s sympathy by showing the miser the impoverished family of his clerk, Bob Cratchit, the Christmas spirit in Alcott’s tale shows Effie the many children who are less fortunate than her.

By the time Effie wakes up, her enthusiasm for Christmas has been renewed, and—rather like the March sisters in the beginning of Little Women—she is inspired to spend the day giving gifts to poor children.

Little Women (2019) - Merry Christmas, World

What inspired Alcott to write “A Christmas Dream”?

Although no explicit evidence indicates what led Alcott to adapt A Christmas Carol for children, two factors might have led her to write “A Christmas Dream.” First, Dickens was a major influence on Alcott’s writing throughout her life. In Little Women, the March sisters start a weekly newspaper called the Pickwick Portfolio, after Dickens’ first novel, The Pickwick Papers. In their youth, Alcott and her sisters created a similarly Dickens-inspired publication, which they dubbed the Pickwick.

One of Alcott’s diary entries might offer more insights. In December 1881, a year before she published “A Christmas Dream,” the author wrote in her journal that “a poor woman in [Illinois] writes me to send her children some Xmas gifts, being too poor and ill to get any. They asked her to write to Santa Claus, and she wrote to me. Sent a box and made a story about it. $100.”

The $100 payment suggests that the story Alcott referenced in the entry isn’t “A Christmas Dream,” for which she received $125 a year later. But it shows that events in her life were drawing her thoughts toward themes of giving at Christmas.

Interestingly, in that same 1881 entry, Alcott noted that her niece Louisa May Nieriker, whom she raised after the death of her youngest sister, was “much interested, and kept bringing all her best toys and clothes ‘for poor little boys.’ A generous baby.” Could Alcott have had her niece, who went by the nickname Lulu, in mind when she wrote “A Christmas Dream,” which ends with Effie giving toys to little girls from poor families in a Christmas celebration organized by her mother?

Why has “A Christmas Dream” been overlooked?

The lesson shared in “A Christmas Dream” is connected to another running theme in Alcott’s fiction, says Monika Elbert, a literary scholar at Montclair State University.

“In some stories, Alcott focuses on the unhappy rich girl protagonist at Christmas,” Elbert writes in an email. “Often, the plight of the poor provides an opportunity for the wealthy to feel good about themselves, which is the basis of modern philanthropy.”

This theme might be part of the reason that “A Christmas Dream” has been largely forgotten.

While newspaper reports indicate that the story was sometimes read aloud at Christmas celebrations during the 20th century, few have heard of “A Christmas Dream” today. Turnquist attributes this in part to how Alcott conveyed her still-relevant message about the importance of giving. She describes it as too improbable and heavy-handed for modern readers’ tastes.

“It’s a little unrealistic to imagine a child saying, ‘Mother, I hope we don’t celebrate Christmas anymore. I’m bored of it!’” Turnquist argues. “It doesn’t ring true. But you do still see people who receive gifts and then move on immediately to wanting the next great thing. So maybe the fact that ‘A Christmas Dream’ has been forgotten has less to do with the message itself, which is still relevant, than with the way Alcott packages it.”

Another possible explanation for the tale’s obscurity is that it simply got buried in the many stories that Alcott wrote for magazines and periodicals. During her lifetime, the author published more than 300 works, many of which were short stories, though these tend to be lesser known than her novels. Alcott’s early short stories had “much to do with opening the door to [her] career as a professional writer,” wrote biographer Madeleine B. Stern in 1992.

However influential these shorter works were in Alcott’s day, the media in which they were published—periodicals and magazines—are generally more transient and more disposable, both materially and in historical memory, than books.

“Many of Alcott’s Christmas stories are written for children’s magazines, like Harper’s Young People,” Elbert says. “Maybe that’s why Dickens is remembered or read more widely: His publication venue was larger and more literary.”

Nonetheless, Alcott’s overlooked short stories have presented historians with something of a treasure hunt. Some scholars have gone searching “in the now-crumbling weeklies of the 1850s and 1860s,” in Stern’s words, for works that Alcott wrote under various pseudonyms.

Perhaps “A Christmas Dream” has one final enigma to offer modern readers: the enduring question of how having too much or not enough played out not only in Alcott’s fiction but also in her own life. After all, the author’s literary success carried her from poverty to unexpected wealth.

“[Alcott’s] family really always made sure that their girls were educated,” Turnquist says. “Her parents let their daughters have dreams and real agency to get to those dreams, even though they were often struggling financially.”

While Alcott was an ambitious individual, perhaps even she could not have anticipated the level of success she would attain in her lifetime.

“She … had the sensibility of someone with great aspirations,” Turnquist says. “I don’t know whether she imagined, when she was young, that she would become truly wealthy—but, of course, she did.”

Even after Alcott found success, she felt as if something had been lost in the process. In her diary, she reflected on how the struggle to support her family financially had “cost me my health.”

As Alcott wrote in a January 1874 entry, “When I had the youth, I had no money. Now I have the money, I have no time, and when I get the time, if I ever do, I shall have no health to enjoy life.”

Alcott was far from a starving artist by the time she wrote “A Christmas Dream.” But she still harbored a kind of hunger that money and fame couldn’t satisfy. In the end, maybe having too much of one thing, like money, meant having too little of another, like free time to dwell in the world of her gifted imagination—and this may well be one reason that Alcott’s need to keep writing endured.