by Ellen Gilbert // Original Illustrations by John Leech
The year 2012 marks the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens’s birth, and celebrations of his life and work are being held worldwide. Dickens (1812-1870) produced 15 novels that introduced nearly 1,000 characters. As the year comes to an end, it seems appropriate to consider one of his most beloved books, and one of the most beloved books of the holiday season.
“I have promised at the end of the year, if all go [sic] well, to read the Christmas Carol to the Town Hall full of working people,” Dickens wrote to his friend, the philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts, in early January of 1853. “If there were any hope of your seeing them, I think I could assure you one of the most remarkable sights that this country could produce,” As A Christmas Carol is played out every year at holiday time in theaters, movie houses, that “remarkable scene” (and sound) is, no doubt, the sight of men, women, and children mopping up their tears as they hear—for the first time or the thirtieth—the story of Ebenezer Scrooge’s breathtaking, overnight metamorphosis, from curmudgeonly misanthrope to ebullient sharer of Christmas joy. It’s a short book—less than 30,000 words—but it packs a resounding punch. At the turn of the 20th century it was believed to be the second most-read book of all time, second only to the Bible. Writer Lee Sandiford suggests that it’s no coincidence that any number of people may find themselves thinking about the “odd” fact that they received a turkey from their boss at Christmas.
A “Year of Dickens,” is being celebrated by the The Free Library of Philadelphia, which is home to a remarkable collection of Dickensiana. The current exhibition is devoted to Dickens’s passion for the theater, and features rare playbills, letters, and memorabilia reflecting Dickens’s “lifelong relationship with the world of theatre.” Curators describe him as “a theatrical personality inclined to wear bright colors and flashy items,” and Dickens scholar John Glavin confirms Dickens’s love of the theater, noting that throughout his life, “Dickens paid fierce, unremitting attention to other people’s plays and to other people’s performances.” Dickens’s description of a “most remarkable sight” elicited by his own reading of A Christmas Carol reminds us that he himself was, perhaps, his own best interpreter. Among Firestone Library’s holdings on Dickens is “a facsimile of the author’s prompt-copy” of “the public reading version” of A Christmas Carol. “He worked as hard at the presentation of his works, and of himself, as he did at his writing and editing,” writes Smiley.
While he staged many performances with his family and friends in his living room at Tavistock House, sometimes referred to as “The Smallest Theatre in the World,” curators at the Free Library of Philadelphia note that he “performed, with his amateur troupe on professional stages as well, and held an enormous fascination with the theatre and performers.” Playbills in the Philadelphia exhibit announce “three performances every night” and provide remarkably detailed descriptions of each scene.
Dickens originally called his story, A Christmas Carol in Prose: Being a Ghost Story of Christmas. It came to be known, of course, as A Christmas Carol, or sometimes, just Scrooge. Dickens wrote the story in only six weeks, beginning in October 1843 and ending in time for Christmas publication. “Never had he worked before with such furious energy and enthusiasm, with so much laughter and so many tears,” writes J.B. Priestly in his biography of Dickens. In The Man Who Invented Christmas (subtitled, “How Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol Rescued his Career and Revived our Holiday Spirits”), Les Sandiford recounts the circumstances surrounding the book’s publication. The Princeton Public Library owns a copy of this “classic about a classic,” along with various versions of the story rendered for children and adults over the years in print, on film, and in sound. The library’s copy of Priestley’s Charles Dickens and his World bears a very Princeton phenomenon: someone has corrected (in green ink) a photo caption, and rather than “Dickens with his family and friends in 1857,” we are told that the photo is of “The Cast of Frozen Deep including Wilkie Collins (kneeling with head in hand) and daughter Kate.”
More esoteric treatments of A Christmas Carol may be found in Princeton University’s Firestone Library, where typing in “Charles Dickens” to do a catalog search draws so many hits that you almost imagine you can see smoke emanating from the hard-working computer. Firestone holdings range from Hearing the Gospel Through Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol,” to an 1914 volume with the formidable title, Charles Dickens in Chancery, being an account of his proceedings in respect of the “Christmas Carol” with some gossip in relation to the old law courts at Westminster. Translations of A Christmas Carol at Firestone include an 1844 Dutch edition; a Hungarian edition published in 1907; and a 1955 volume of Christmas stories told in Japanese.
“What makes A Christmas Carol work,” says author Jane Smiley writing in a Penguin Lives biography of Dickens, “is the lightness of Dickens’s touch. Instead of hammering his moral points home, as he does in Martin Chuzzlewit, he is content (or more content) to let his images speak for themselves.” Details, “both picturesque and thematically evocative,” are, she observes, “conveyed without any overbearing tone of self-display.”
For the full text of this story, please subscribe to Princeton Magazine.