When he was curator of London's Charles Dickens Museum, Dr. Parker was frequently asked by journalists and visitors about Christmas and the Dickens connection. The questions amounted usually to: "You could say, couldn't you, that Charles Dickens was the man who invented Christmas." Christmas Dickens proponents argue that their man redirected public attention to the old Christian customs and festivals, as though England ceased to be jolly with the decline of the Middle Ages and the rise of Modernity. To set the record straight and correct such blind assertions, this book grew. With A Christmas Carol, Dickens - "with many others - rekindled seasonal rejoicing only among a minority. No rekindling was needed for the majority. The Christmas books, the stories about Christmas, and the Christmas episodes in other works by Dickens all in fact grow organically out of a living festive tradition...What above all is needed - and what I have tried to supply - is patient interpretation of historical sources and of Dickens's own writings, free of perverse preoccupation...I offer, therefore, a history of the festival in England from its inception up to Dickens's own day, an analysis of Dickens's writings on it, and an explanation of why it is that both history and writings have been misunderstood" - Preface.