I had already done my annual reading of this in November, but then the Amherst Book Group talked about it as a one-off (just one discussion since it’s short) between The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and Half of a Yellow Sun. So once again I took the opportunity to read the annotated edition, and the extra content is mostly what I recorded.
In this book I learned
- The long list of adaptations led me to probably the strangest, Rich Little’s Christmas Carol (1963) – basically an excuse for Little to trot out all his impressions. The “casting” is a little random!
- W.C. Fields/Scrooge
- Paul Lynde/Bob Crachit
- Johnny Carson/nephew Fred
- Laurel and Hardy/the two gentlemen collecting donations
- Nixon/Marley
- Humphrey Bogart/Ghost of Christmas Past
- Groucho/Fezziwig, Columbo/Ghost of Christmas Present
- Edith Bunker/Mrs. Cratchit
- Truman Capote/Tiny Tim
- Inspector Clouseau/Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come
- George Burns, John Wayne, & ? somebody with a cane and top hat?/rag and boneman scene
- Jack Benny/kid in the street who fetches the turkey
- An Orwell quote, “It seems that in every attack Dickens makes upon society he is always pointing to a change in spirit rather than a change of structure, ” led me first to Orwell’s “Can Socialists be Happy?” before finding the origin in “Charles Dickens.”
- Dickens’ the Life of Our Lord – “No one ever lived who was so good, so kind, so gentle, and so sorry for all people who did wrong, or were in any way ill or miserable”
- In his library at Gad’s Hill, Dickens had a set of fake books in the set The Wisdom of Our Ancestors: Ignorance, Superstition, The Block, The Stake, The Rack, Dirt, and Disease.
- Welsh wig
- James T. Fields observed that Dickens “liked to dilate in imagination over the brewing of a bowl of punch, but I always noticed that when the punch was ready, he drank less of it than any one who might be present. It was the sentiment of the thing, and not the thing itself, that engaged his attention.”
- Scalpers and people camping out in line the night before to get tickets to Dickens’ public readings
- Dickens was criticized for “the rising inflection” (upspeak?)
- Dickens reading Bob Crachit’s speech “brought out so many pocket handerchiefs that it looked as if a snowstorm had somehow got into the hall without tickets”
Quotes from the annotations
- Re Doré’s illustrations: “Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Present look remarkably like Dante and Virgil exploring the rings of Hell in Dante’s Inferno, which Doré was also illustrating in 1961.”
- “Utilitarians have never been fond of A Christmas Carol.“
- “Remarkably, no scene in this Christmas story takes place in a church, no clergyman plays a role in the drama.”
- Ruskin in a letter to Charles Eliot Norton: “His Christmas meant mistletoe and pudding — neither resurrection from dead, nor rising of new stars, nor teaching of wise men, nor shepherds.”
- In the manuscript, Dickens included a digression on what Hamlet would be like as a relative: “He would be a most impracticable fellow to deal with; and however creditable he might be to the family after his decease, he would prove a special encumbrance in his lifetime, trust me.”
Every night I read I am described (mostly by people who have not the faintest notion of observing) from the sole of my boot to where the topmost hair of my head ought to be, but is not. Sometimes I am described as being “evidently nervous;” sometimes it is rather taken ill that “Mr. Dickens is so extraordinarily composed.” My eyes are blue, red, grey, white, green, brown, black, hazel, violet, and rainbow-coloured. I am like “a well-to-do American gentleman,” and the Emperor of the French, with an occasional touch of the Emperor of China, and a deterioration from the attributes of our famous townsman, Rufus W. B. D. Dodge Grumsher Pickville. I say all sorts of things that I never said, go to all sorts of places that I never saw or heard of, and have done all manner of things (in some previous state of existence I suppose) that have quite escaped my memory.
Dickens in a letter – see https://www.gutenberg.org/files/25853/25853-h/25853-h.htm
Quotes from the text
- “when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.”
- “a lowering pile of building up a yard, where it had so little business to be, that one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was a young house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses, and forgotten the way out again”
- ‘“There are some upon this earth of yours,” returned the Spirit, “who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived.’
- ‘“Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead,” said Scrooge. “But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change.”‘
- “No fog, no mist; clear, bright, jovial, stirring, cold; cold, piping for the blood to dance to; Golden sunlight; Heavenly sky; sweet fresh air; merry bells. Oh, glorious! Glorious!”
- “He went to church, and walked about the streets, and watched the people hurrying to and fro, and patted children on the head, and questioned beggars, and looked down into the kitchens of houses, and up to the windows, and found that everything could yield him pleasure. He had never dreamed that any walk—that anything—could give him so much happiness.” (like Wally in My Dinner with André talking about his cold coffee)
“Oh! captive, bound, and double-ironed,” cried the phantom, “not to know, that ages of incessant labour by immortal creatures, for this earth must pass into eternity before the good of which it is susceptible is all developed. Not to know that any Christian spirit working kindly in its little sphere, whatever it may be, will find its mortal life too short for its vast means of usefulness. Not to know that no space of regret can make amends for one life’s opportunity misused!”