A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens
We’re celebrating Christmas Week and Dickens Tuesday with my favorite Dickens!
A Christmas Carol is a perfect short story. It might be the best short story. Hell, it might be the most perfect piece of word-based entertainment humans have ever created! Okay…maybe I took it a little far. But I truly believe A Christmas Carol is a fantastic work of fiction.
Some of you are no doubt yawning and confused by my excitement. But that may be due to A Chrsitmas Carol being EVERYWHERE, especially this time of year. So it’s easy to overlook this novella and be blind to its brilliance because A Christmas Carol has become like bacon – bacon is on everything so you don’t even really appreciate it any more.
But imagine not knowing anything about bacon and then taking a bite for the first time.
Better yet, imagine knowing nothing of this story. Picture yourself coming to this as a newbie, picking up the book for the first time. You don’t know the characters. You don’t know the pop culture references. You don’t know Scrooge McDuck. You don’t know Mr. Burns.
Coming at this fresh, you’d see that this story is wild! And scary! And weird! And thoughtful! The beginning is an amazing setup and the ending is a total payoff, a victory lap of joy!
If you haven’t read the sacred text, I STRONGLY encourage you to do so. Because it’s in the public domain, it’s easy to pull up the short story on your favorite digital device. Stuck in line at the store? Read this. Sitting on the couch with nothing to do? Read this. Acting miserly and mean for the past few years? Read this.
You can also get a free audio version from just about every major streaming service or YouTube. The novella only takes a few hours to listen to, so you can knock out the whole thing in a short roadtrip.
Not only is the story a solid, feel-good romp, but the writing is perfect. Consider all the plot and backstory Dickens elegantly crams into the first chapter. He introduces the characters, the setting and the rules of the ghostly visitations all in a few pages. And those pages are dripping with atmosphere and humor and tension.
Most movie versions stick closely to the original story, because the story is a perfect length for dramatizations. Entire lines of dialogue will be familiar to you, even if you’ve only seen a movie version in passing. Most movie versions tend to just shorten things up a bit – and I think nearly all of them omit a scene of Bob Cratchit looking at the body of his dead son during the Ghost of Christmas Future section. They don’t make a Hallmark ornament for that scene.
What’s my favorite part? Marley…everything Marley. His introduction is one of the spookiest scenes I’ve ever read. I love the back-and-forth banter/bickering between him and Scrooge, including this iconic line delivered by Scrooge:
“You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you.”
And while I hate the idea of unnecessary prequels and sequels, I could get onboard with a whole book about Marley, from his turning into a ghost, to his adventures in the spectral realm.
Do I own a Jacob Marley action figure? Yes. He’s looking at me now as I type this. He sends his regards. (And yes, the Ghost of Christmas Past is behind him in the photo.)
I could go on and on about A Christmas Carol – discussing how this was the turning point in Dickens’ career where he went from popular novelist to literary genius. (After writing this, he would go on to write the big, iconic Dickens works such as David Copperfield, Bleak House, Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities).
But I think you get the point. I love this story. And I think you should read it…evey year…aloud…with a British accent.
Don’t be a (pre-ghostly visitation) Scrooge! Help me raise money for Reading is Fundamental. Click here to donate!
