A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings.

A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings

Charles Dickens

Penguin Classics

ISBN 0140439056, US $8.00, UK 6.99 Brit. pounds, Can. $12.00 325 pages

This book is in some small part biographical material on Charles Dickens himself. Of his Christmas writings, less than one-third is a restatement of his famed 1843 work whose full original name was, "A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas."--nowadays simply called, "A Christmas Carol".

More specifically, that slender tale occupies 92 pages of the book, against 112 for "The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain"--but the former is better known by far than the latter, despite its 20 more pages.

The volume as a whole is "Edited with an introduction by Michael Slater", who seems to further describe himself as a "distinguished Dickens scholar". Slater and others fill the first 30-odd pages with assorted introductory materials. Then come 264 pages of actual Dickens works, interspersed with a few pages of oldfashioned illustrations; and finally, 24 additional pages of appendices and endnotes.

Dickens, it would seem, hit just the right tone to appeal to the masses of his day with his emphasis on generosity and fellowship--especially at Christmastime, although he was not alone in that aim. He did it so well, in fact, and so consistently over a number of years, that in his time he became a virtual "Father Christmas personified" in both Britain and the United States.

Not, however, that he was able to put out "Carol"-sized Christmas fictions every year during the period in question. In some years his offerings were brief, while in 1851 he published an essay, "What Christmas Is, as We Grow Older"--a topic that was close to his heart, no doubt, but unlikely to charm children.

Eight individual Christmas writings by Dickens are quoted in this book, titled as follows:

"Christmas Festivities"

"The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton"

A Christmas episode from "Master Humphrey's Clock"

"A Christmas Carol"

"The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain"

"A Christmas Tree"

"What Christmas Is, as We Grow Older"

"The Seven Poor Travellers".

Dickens, Slater tells us, had other themes than bonhomie to share with his readers at Christmas, some of these being poverty, the burdens of ill will, and bereavement. Accordingly, he is no stranger to bittersweet thoughts, but in one instance he rather shocked me by describing how a sour old brute of a church sexton/gravedigger assaulted a small boy with his lantern, merely because the poor urchin sang merrily on Christmas Eve.

Such, though, evidently were those times, and to Dickens belongs much credit for injecting at least some civility into society.

These Dickensian writings need not be thought of, by persons of other persuasions, as specifically Christian works. There is no religion or set of values worthy of the name that would not support Dickens's views and attitudes on such questions as those of understanding, kindliness, generosity, and good cheer even in the face of the most dreadful adversities. They are not to be confined to the Christmas season, either.

While, to my slight knowledge, Dickens wrote chiefly of contemporaneous matters, (but not, however, in "A Tale of Two Cities", which in 1859 described conditions as they had been in the 1790s), to us his times were rather quaint. Consider this volume's cover illustration, taken from a hand-coloured engraving--surely an extinct process, today.