A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

I was cruising my bookshelves last week looking for a book to read in the run up to Christmas. Sometimes looking at a bookshelf is a bit like ‘shopping your closet’ where you have to look at what you’ve got with a fresh eye in the hope that something jumps out at you when you don't know what you're really in the mood for. In this case the fresh eye was noticing that I had a copy of A Christmas Carol bought on impulse from Munro’s bargain book table about 18 months ago and promptly forgotten about. Really, it might as well have been doing a dance on the bookshelf shouting ‘read me’, because if there is ever a time to read A Christmas Carol it’s in the week before Christmas.

I should say at this point that I am not a Dickens fan. I remember having to read Hard Times as part of a curriculum on industrial history when I was at college and there’s nothing like forcing someone to read an author they’re already not predisposed towards, to put you off that author without ever giving them another chance.

Anyway, back to A Christmas Carol. Given my avoidance of Dickens it’s not actually surprising that I haven’t read it, but at the same time it still surprised me a little because I know the story so well from the many film and TV adaptations (starting with the Alistair Sim film of course) that I kind of assumed I had read the book. So it was interesting to go back to the source material and try to read it without bringing the baggage of my foreknowledge with me. The answer is that it's really hard!

I have to say, having seen adaptations made the story an easier read than I was expecting. I did have to roll my eyes at myself when I thought I’d found a flaw in Dickens' logic. Marley says that Scrooge will be visited by three ghosts – “… the first tomorrow when the bell tolls one…the second on the next night at the same hour. The third upon the next night when the last stroke of twelve has ceased to vibrate.”

Reading this made me stop and go ‘hang on, Marley appears to Scrooge on Christmas Eve and the point of the visitations is that Scrooge has his epiphany in time to become the anti-Scrooge on Christmas Day. Looking at the timeline Marley laid out for the visitations that isn’t going to work – Oh My God, why has no one noticed this timeline flaw before…'  I know anyone reading this entry is rolling their eyes and going, stupid girl, the ghosts aren’t bound by normal rules of linear time. It made me realise that this is one of the issues of being familiar with the material – it made me think Dickens had got it wrong until I realised what was happening with the compression of time – because really how likely is it that Dickens made a mistake with this and no one had noticed until I came along - talk about hubris on my part!

The other thing about being familiar with the story is when things you think are going to happen, don’t happen. It makes you think for a moment that this edition of the book must be lacking, that maybe you should shake the book and see if the missing pages fall out. The case in point is Scrooge seeing Marley’s face in the door knocker. So far, so good. But for some reason I expected him to see Marley’s pigtail hanging down the other side of the door knocker inside the door.  Dickens actually says after Scrooge shut the front door that “he did look cautiously behind it first, as if he half-expected to be terrified with the sight of Marley’s pig-tail sticking out into the hall. But there was nothing on the back of the door, except the screws and nuts that held the knocker on…” This really made me stop and think because I was expecting the pigtail to hang from the inside of the door so that scene must have been in one of the adaptions that I’ve seen, even though not only is it not in the book, Dickens specifically says it isn’t there, so some adapter out there deliberately went against Dickens on this one if I'm not imagining this scene. It’s funny how you can be brought up short when expectation doesn’t match up with reality, even when reality in this case is the source material. (BTW, I’ve no idea what adaption of A Christmas Carol has the scene with Marley’s pigtail, but the fact that it’s in my head means it’s out there somewhere!)

Anyway, once I got over myself I enjoyed A Christmas Carol immensely. Scrooge is suitably terrified by the three ghosts, the way his own words are turned back on him are no less effective for being familiar “Are there no prisons?…Are there no workhouses?” By the time Scrooge has finished his ghostly travels I believed in his change and I happily let Dickens manipulate my emotions so I ached for the boy he’d been and the society that had turned him into the man he’d become before Marley and the ghosts’ interventions. And of course, I cheered in a spirit of Christmas bonhomie at the end when Tiny Tim says, “God Bless Us, Every One.”

I know it isn’t much of a review to say – ‘I didn’t know if I’d enjoy this story but turns out I did’. Not much analysis going on there, but sometimes you can just read something and let it wash over you and that seemed like the perfect thing to do in Christmas week.

The copy of a Christmas Carol I have part of a compendium with two other Dicken’s short stories – The Chimes and The Haunted Man. Despite having enjoyed Scrooge’s tale, it hasn’t really converted me to a Dickens reader. I will get to the other two short stories, but not right now. I have other metaphorical fish to fry and Scrooge and company have a goose to cook.

The other thing I want to mention about the version I have is that it has an introduction by novelist John Irving. I deliberately didn’t read the introduction first as I wanted to read the story without someone else’s thoughts in my head. (Or at least without anyone else’s thoughts other than all the myriad producers of the film and TV adaptations!) What I did find fascinating when I went back to read what Irving had to say, is that he talks about being in Gujarat in northwest India in 1990, living with the Great Royal Circus. One day he finds a group of the circus kids gathered around a TV screen riveted as they watched A Christmas Carol. It turns out that tales of ghostly visitations and redemption transcend cultural and language barriers. While that in itself is no revelation, the thing that really caught my eye about Irving’s introduction is that the same children and their families gathered around the TV every Sunday morning to watch the epic Mahabharata which was being televised in 93 parts. This made me think of Dickens' tales being serialised in the periodicals of his day (like Conan Doyle) and readers eagerly waiting for the next part. It made me think that the Indian circus troupe Irving describes and Dickens' Victorian readers have more in common that you’d ever expect – give someone a good story and lay out the breadcrumbs for what might happen next and you’ll find an audience wherever they are situated.

My copy of A Christmas Carol and Other Stories by Charles Dickens was published by The Modern Library, an imprint of Random House in 2001.