A Christmas Carol
A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story for Christmas, more commonly known just as A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens was first published in 1843 and is one of his most well known and loved works. At under 2900 words it is classed as a novella, that is, a work that is longer than a short story, but not long enough to be classed as a novel. As a novella it is in good company with others famous novellas such as The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – Robert Louis Stephenson (1886), Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad (1899) (on which the film Apocalypse Now is based), The Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka (1915), I Am Legend – Richard Matheson (1954) (made into a film three times, with three different titles, The Last Man on Earth in 1964, The Omega Man in 1971, and I Am Legend in 2007), and Animal Farm – George Orwell (1945).
Christmas
A Christmas Carol is an annual favourite around Christmas time and is available in various formats. There are print editions, ebooks, audio books and plays, theatre plays, and a selection of film adaptations. The film adaptations range from A Christmas Carol (1951, starring Alastair Sim), through A Christmas Carol (1971, animation, Scrooge voiced by Alastair Sim), Christmas Carol (1991, starring John Stewart) to The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) , and everyone has their own favourite. Which one is yours? Its impact on our speech remains; it popularised the phrase “Merry Christmas” and the term Scrooge is still applied to someone who is miserly.
However, Dickens’ other Christmas works are less well known, including The Chimes (1844), The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), The Battle of Life (1846) and The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain (1848). Of particular note in relation to A Christmas Carol is The Goblins Who Stole a Sexton. A sexton is typically an employee of the church with various duties, which may include grave digging. This was a story within The Pickwick Papers (1837). No plot spoilers here, but it is often though of as a precursor to A Christmas Carol, and so is well worth reading on that basis alone.
Social Justice
The majority of Dickens’ work however was not focussed around Christmas. In total he wrote fifteen novels, including the aptly named The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which was fated to forever to remain a mystery as Dickens died before it was completed. Most people will be familiar with some of these works, from the books themselves, audio books, or film adaptations.
So why should we still read, watch, and listen to Dickens? A key element of Dickens’ work, both fictional and journalistic, was that of social justice. His novels presented a social commentary on Victorian society and challenged the middle-class assumptions about things such as criminality. They laid bare the grim realities of the poverty that working class people endured and the class inequalities that were endemic in society, and so ensured that these issued were brought into the light of the Victorian day. Such was his impact that Karl Marx said of the “splendid brotherhood of fiction writers in England”, in which he included Thackeray, Brontë and Gaskell as well as Dickens, that their “graphic and eloquent pages have issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together”, and in turn George Bernard Shaw said of Little Dorrit that it was “A more seditious book than Das Kapital”. Social justice is still something that is an issue, and reading Dickens gives us the lens to view it through from a Victorian perspective, and so can see what things have changed for the better, and what things sadly still need to be addressed.
Resources
Here at Learn for Pleasure we like TED talks, and Iseult Gillespie gives and interesting talk on “Why should you read Charles Dickens”:
Project Gutenberg provides free public domain ebooks that can be read online or downloaded in various ereader formats for free – view the ebooks of Dickens’ works from Project Gutenberg.
LibriVox provides free public domain audiobooks read by volunteers – view the audiobooks of Dickens’ works at LibriVox.