It’s Christmas time and as with most years, one of the most popular stories of all time is in the forefront of the holiday in one way or another: A Christmas Carol.
Now this story has been recorded, read and adapted to movies so many times it is hard to count them. The characters in it have become part of everyone vernacular: Scrooge, Tiny Tim, Bob Cratchit and others. These characters have been played on stage and on the silver screen by everyone from Shakespearean actors to the Muppets. Uncounted knockoffs of the story have been done, with twists and turns, and there are total departures from the original story littering popular culture left and right.
In this day and age of a million television channels, streaming video services and Facebook it is easy for people to know the basic story, yet know little about it or who was behind it. If you ask many people they have no idea that Charles Dickens wrote the original story as a short book. Many don’t even know who Dickens was.
In his day (born in 1812, died in 1870) Dickens was probably the most well-known author of his time. In fact, if one does any research about his life, for his time he would be what is considered a rock star today: probably in influence, considering the times, bigger than the Beatles ever were. But his mode of entertainment was the written word, not music.
My mom loved books
My mother was a lover of books, despite the fact she never had more than an early junior high education. While much of what she read was romantic novels, she also loved a lot of the classics. I remember as a small boy looking high on the shelves of her book closet, which doubled as a coat closet by the door in our living room, where there were piles of novels. There were also books scattered all over the house in all kinds of places. I believe to this day if we would have had an extra room in the house we could have had a full fledged library and she would have loved it.
One set of classics I remember well, and I still keep on shelves I built around the sliding glass door at the back of our present home, was a series of 27 books with nothing but the writings of Dickens in them. They are old and many of the bindings are coming apart today, but at the time they seemed so alluring to me as a boy that I asked my mom if I could read them. I remember my interest in Dickens’ work was sparked by seeing the 1938 movie rendition of “A Christmas Carol” on television one holiday season. Finally she said yes, and a whole new world of books opened up for me.
Reading is tougher than watching
However, being a kid, I didn’t realize how much movies and television dumbed down good literature. Reading Dickens’ actual words on the page was much more difficult than watching an interpretation of them, an interpretation that for the most part loses a lot of the color and depth of character that you get when you read something. Reading Dickens or most other good authors takes some work and thought. Of course, the first thing I tried to read was “A Christmas Carol”, and I found it a bit more difficult than reading my Superman comic books.
But what was more surprising to me, and still is to even many adults today, is that Dickens actually wrote three other Christmas books besides the one we all love, and dozens of short Christmas stories too. My mother’s collection held many of these tales and at one time I thought it had all of them. In years since they I have discovered many more. Not all are great, but all the ones I have read are good.
Few people realize that Dickens actually published his own magazine, “All the Year Round”, for many years. We tend to think of 19th century writers as huddled in some hovel turning out obscure stories that weren’t recognized as great literature during their lifetimes. Dickens was not one of those. Well known across Great Britain and across the world for his books and stories, he was not only famous but rich. It is important to remember that this prolific writer who gave us not only one of the most important novels of all time, “Great Expectations”, also printed hundreds of articles and essays covering subjects from political commentary to financial advice. In fact, the magazine he published and edited was not a literary magazine, although some of his best works came through that magazine as part of its appeal, it was about everyday living, particularly about financial success. In the day he was considered an excellent resource for anyone who wanted to understand finance and how to invest properly.
For the money
We sometimes think these great writers did what they did purely for the art, but in Dickens and other cases they did it because they knew they could make a lot of money. Unlike many writers, he never underestimated the worth of his production when it came to book publishers. He was a tough negotiator and if a book was selling well, he never hesitated to go back to the publisher and demand more money for his work, often being pretty hard nosed to get original contracts changed. I can imagine the butterflies that some publishers felt in their stomachs when he showed up in their office to talk about the latest work they had published of his.
It is interesting how we get images of people from the past as well. Dickens had a fiery personality and was certainly a flawed person, based on what has come out about him over the years. He often groused to friends that he was not being paid enough for his work and complained loudly about a lot of things, including complaining about how he had become haunted by “A Christmas Carol” and its legacy. On the other hand, what genius in any field is perfect?
Formed by bad luck
The thing about Dickens’ vast number of Christmas stories is that they come from a mind that was formed by the misfortune of youth, living in poor circumstances and working menial jobs. Never getting more than a seventh grade education, he saw the world as a place where the rich crushed the poor continually. Consequently when he became wealthy his financial records showed that his biggest expenditures came from donations to all kinds of charities.
A dark story
While I have never had the opportunity to read it, apparently the original publication of “A Christmas Carol” was much darker than the one most of us read today. While the story has been revised by legions of editors for publication over the years, many of the biggest changes to it were done by Dickens himself before he died 27 years later.
If you are interested in reading some of his other Christmas stories there are some websites that have the full text of both his Christmas books and some of his stories. One that is easy to access and has six of his stories that can be read on-line www.dickens-online.info/some-short-christmas-stories.html
Of course you could always read the books that are published today with all those stories in. That may be the harder way to quench your curiosity, but in the long run it is also the most rewarding.
What the Dickens?
Rick Shaw