[A
Saturday Feature of the First Road Blog]
It
isn’t too late to read instead-of or as-well-as watching Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Beginning in 1951 viewing was the thing for me. It
was a childhood tradition to find the Alastar Sim version on one of our three channels. Then the movie was replaced by an operatic
version - which may explain some of my ambivalence toward opera to this day. In
later years I discovered a VHS edition and reintroduced the program to my
yearly experience of the holidays. Now Judy and I enjoy the old show in a colorized DVD
edition.
Now, finally, I have read the book and found it well suited to being a tradition of its own. A section read each night completes the project in less than a week and it is in harmony with the 1951 movie. There are additions and relocations and omissions, of course, but nothing like the almost total re-writes and plot-line changes so common in modern movie “adaptations." For example, the housekeeper in the movie is not in the book. However, the book's description of Scrooge’s visit to his own deathbed is not in the movie. In my opinion Scrooge’s reform on Christmas Day is much more thorough in the book. Also, I enjoy Dickens’ observations as, for example, when the changed Scrooge laughs with relief that he has not died after all.
Now, finally, I have read the book and found it well suited to being a tradition of its own. A section read each night completes the project in less than a week and it is in harmony with the 1951 movie. There are additions and relocations and omissions, of course, but nothing like the almost total re-writes and plot-line changes so common in modern movie “adaptations." For example, the housekeeper in the movie is not in the book. However, the book's description of Scrooge’s visit to his own deathbed is not in the movie. In my opinion Scrooge’s reform on Christmas Day is much more thorough in the book. Also, I enjoy Dickens’ observations as, for example, when the changed Scrooge laughs with relief that he has not died after all.
Really,
for a man who had been out of practice for so many years, it was a splendid
laugh, a most illustrious laugh. The father of a long, long line of brilliant
laughs!
And
then there are the asides. Dickens tells us Scrooge’s former partner,
Jacob Marley, is "dead as a door nail." Then he takes a moment to say:
Mind!
I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is
particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to
regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the
wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not
disturb it.
As for Scrooge’s aloofness, Dickens, with a flourish of the pen, describes him as being solitary as an oyster.
The
message of the story, you may remember, has to do with the second of what I
call the Sovereign Commands – love for neighbor. It is not a source for
information on the afterlife; but it is not intended to be. It is, instead, an
artistic presentation of the darkness of belated regret. There is something to
be said for Marley’s agonized exclamation – “Mankind was my business!”
A
copy of A Christmas Carol is not out
of your reach. To be sure, there is the local library; but it can also be found
on Amazon.com in book,
video,
and Kindle edition. You can even download a free copy in PDF
format.
Enjoy!
And have a Merry Christmas.
Thank you!
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