A Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens
100 pages
published in 1843
Sandra always loved Dickens more than any other Victorean novelist and she always tried to convince me to try him but never succeeded. So I thought that it would be nice to try a couple of his novels next year in her honour and to warm up I thought I’d start with A Christmas Carol. It’s short, it’s the season and the story is so familiar to me from various adaptations that I could almost read it on autopilot. I actually read it in its entirety on the train journey to my parents when I was going home for Christmas.
Stories like A Christmas Carol, which are so popular and have been adapted so often that they’ve become part of the background cultural noise, are always interesting to go back to. With some of these stories the original is so different from what you expect that it’s actually a disappointment to read them, as you run into all the awkward bits that had been filed off through various retellings. This wasn’t the case with A Christmas Carol: it’s exactly as you’d expect it to be.
The plot is too familiar to recount here and there are only a few minor scenes that differ from what you expect if you only know the movies. What really makes the difference between the original and the various adaptations is Dickens’ writing voice. He is a bit loquacious, won’t use two words where five might do, but he does use his words well. It takes getting used to, but once you are used to his style his verbosity does help set the mood of the story.
As a story the original is even more sentimental than the adaptations of A Christmas Carol are, also helped by Dickens’ writing style. This is a real tearjerker, but than that’s allowed at Christmas. And with the sentimentality Dickens also delivers some harsh blows against those who would ignore the poor even at Christmas, by putting the Malthusian sentiments that justify this into the mouth of Scrooge, then refuting it through the visits of the three ghosts.
So yeah, as a teaser for Dickens’ more serious novels, this worked well.