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A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Books (Everyman's Library)
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About A Christmas Carol And Other Christmas Books
Product Description The final volume in the Everyman’s Library Charles Dickens collection: the timeless story of everyone’s favorite misanthrope, Ebenezer Scrooge, together with four more of Dickens’s Christmas tales and with Arthur Rackham’s classic illustrations. No holiday season is complete without the story of tightfisted Mr. Scrooge, of his long-suffering and mild-mannered clerk, Bob Cratchit, of Bob’s kindhearted lame son, Tiny Tim, and of the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. First published in 1843, A Christmas Carol was republished in 1852 in a new edition with four other Christmas stories— The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life, and The Haunted Man. These beloved tales revived the notion of the Christmas “spirit”—and have kept it alive ever since. About the Author Charles Dickens was born in 1812 in Portsmouth, England, and died in 1870. Margaret Atwood lives in Toronto. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. S C R O O G E: A N I N T R O D U C T I O N Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in 1843, when he was thirty-one. He was already very famous, having made his name with Pickwick Papers and then enhanced it with Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge — and all this before he was thirty. This pace was prodigious. No writer alive had written at such a pace and produced such high-quality work at such a young age. Dickens is said to have written A Christmas Carol in six weeks, to pay off a debt—perhaps that was why grasping moneylenders were much on his mind—and he presented this novella as a light-hearted jeu d’esprit—a Christmas fairy tale or ghost story, intended to entertain, and to put his readers in good humour. The story has the traditional three-part structure of a fairy tale—three Spirits of Christmas, three ages of Scrooge—past, present, future—and it has also a fairy-tale ending, in which light triumphs over darkness, goodness and harmony reign, and an innocent life in peril—Tiny Tim’s—is saved, not to mention the gnarly old soul of Scrooge. Dickens’s more covert intention—signalled by the work’s one-time working title, ‘The Sledgehammer'—was to strike a few more blows for the social justice he was so keen on by contrasting avarice and poverty, then proposing his usual antidote: an outflowing of private benevolence. For, as George Orwell has commented, though Dickens burned with anger at social injustices, he never went so far as to urge a wholesale political revolution. But none of this would account for the overwhelming longevity and popularity of the Carol ’s protagonist—Ebenezer Scrooge. Scrooge is one of those characters—like Hamlet—who has become detached from the story in which he had his birth, and has become instantly recognizable, even by those who may never have read the book. Why should that be? Let me consult my own model of that favourite Dickensian respository of infallible knowledge, ‘The Human Heart’. When did I first meet the immortal Scrooge, and why did I become so fond of him? I seem always to have been aware of him. Did I hear A Christmas Carol read on the radio during my 1940s childhood? It’s likely—those were radio days. Or did I encounter him the way I encountered so much else—peering out with sly and narrow but nonetheless twinkling eyes from the colourful ads in magazines? In this respect, Scrooge was a sort of anti-Santa Claus—Santa Claus’s dark twin. The one, fat and jolly and round and red, dispensing largesse; the other, skinny and pinched and dour, withholding it. Yet at the end of the Carol, the new, redeemed, turkeypurchasing, Bob Cratchit-salary-raising Scrooge has become a sort of Santa; which raises the chilling possibility that Santa might one day shrivel and wizen, and morph into Scrooge at his worst—that crabby geezer who opens the book. Consider those punitive Santean lumps of coal—not much mentioned these days, but kept, you can bet, in Santa’s worst-case re
