The Secret Library by Oliver Tearle

Author:Oliver Tearle [Tearle, Oliver]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781782435587
Publisher: Michael O'Mara Books

The Dickens Christmas

Since Dickens’s A Christmas Carol was published in December 1843, there have been countless stage, screen and radio adaptations. The first film adaptation was a short silent movie version in 1901, titled Scrooge; or, Marley’s Ghost. There have been opera and ballet versions, an all-black musical called Comin’ Uptown (1979), and even a 1973 mime adaptation for the BBC starring Marcel Marceau. The Muppets, Mickey Mouse and Mr Magoo have all offered their take on this timeless story.

Although it was the first of his five festive books, A Christmas Carol wasn’t actually the first Christmas story Dickens wrote. It wasn’t even the first Christmas ghost story Dickens wrote. He’d already written ‘The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton’, featuring miserly Gabriel Grub, an inset tale in his first-ever published novel, The Pickwick Papers (1836–7). The tale shares many of the narrative features that would turn up a few years later in A Christmas Carol: the misanthropic villain, the Christmas Eve setting, the presence of the supernatural, the use of visions which the main character is forced to witness, the focus on poverty and family, and, most importantly, the reforming of the villain into a better person at the close of the story. It’s almost as if Dickens plagiarized A Christmas Carol – from himself.

Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in six weeks during October and November 1843, and it appeared just in time for Christmas, on 19 December. The book’s effect was immediate. Thomas Carlyle, the Scottish historian (whom Dickens greatly admired), went straight out and bought himself a turkey after reading A Christmas Carol. The term ‘Scrooge’ has entered the language as shorthand for a tight-fisted and miserable person. ‘Bah! Humbug!’ has become a universally recognized catchphrase, although Scrooge only uses it twice in the book.

A species of snail, Ba humbugi, has even been named in honour of Scrooge’s well-known phrase.

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