Recommended Reading (Victorian Era Observational Humor Edition)

I'm sure we're all familiar by now with Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. The basic story, anyway. A miserly old man by the unforgettable name of Ebeneezer Scrooge who hates Christmas and says "Bah, humbug" a lot is about to turn in for the night when his sleep is continually interrupted by visits from several ghosts. First his old business partner Marley, and then ghosts of Christmases Past, Present, and Future (though the second spook is actually representing a future, too, just a much closer future than the third spook--I know, I know, I'm overthinking it.) When he wakes the next morning, he loves Christmas so much that he's able to help a little boy named Tiny Tim avoid dying from an unnamed disease (possibly rickets, curable in Dickens' time) that forces him to walk with a crutch when not being carried on somebody's shoulder. There's been at least 17 theatrical film versions, several direct-to-video versions, a few made-for-TV movies, and a few made-for-TV "specials" (which differ from the made-for-TV movies because, well, I guess because the networks say they do.) On top of that there's many, many stage versions--Broadway, Off-Broadway, London's West End, your local community theater, and the school Christmas pageant that you have to see because your kid's in it (like you weren't already forced to sit through the Nativity pageant from the year before.) In addition to all that, there's been several situation comedy version as well. Just off the top of my head, I recall seeing Scrooge's story retold on The Odd Couple, WKRP in Cincinnati, Family Ties, and Sanford and Son (in the latter Lamont as The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come wears an astronaut suit.) With so many versions in so many media outlets, I'm sure you've seen at least one, or ten, or a hundred.

However, I'm curious as to how many of you have actually read the original source material. It was a novel, you know. If you haven't read the book, you really should. Granted, it's the same old, arguably tired, plot (though it would have seemed quite new in 1843.) No surprises there. But Dickens actual telling of the story, i.e., his prose style, offers many unexpected delights to those not acquainted with his work. He was simply one of the most entertaining writers of his era, and can still make us smile in our own. Movie versions of A Christmas Carol can sometimes seem like they might play better on Halloween (the 1951 version with Alastair Sim in particular, though I would highly recommend it anyway. Just don't watch it with the lights turned off.) In the actual novel, however, Dickens offers a counterbalance to the ghostly doings. His third-person omniscient narrator often seems quite amused at the hell all these specters are putting Scrooge through:


Awaking in the middle of a prodigiously tough snore, and sitting up in bed to get his thoughts together, Scrooge had no occasion to be told that the bell was again upon the stroke of One. He felt that he was restored to consciousness in the right nick of time, for the especial purpose of holding a conference with the second messenger dispatched to him through Jacob Marley’s intervention. But finding that he turned uncomfortably cold when he began to wonder which of his curtains this new spectre would draw back, he put them every one aside with his own hands; and lying down again, established a sharp look-out all round the bed. For he wished to challenge the Spirit on the moment of its appearance, and did not wish to be taken by surprise, and made nervous.

Gentlemen of the free-and-easy sort, who plume themselves on being acquainted with a move or two, and being usually equal to the time-of-day, express the wide range of their capacity for adventure by observing that they are good for anything from pitch-and-toss to manslaughter; between which opposite extremes, no doubt, there lies a tolerably wide and comprehensive range of subjects. Without venturing for Scrooge quite as hardily as this, I don’t mind calling on you to believe that he was ready for a good broad field of strange appearances, and that nothing between a baby and rhinoceros would have astonished him very much.

Now I've seen many, many stage and screen versions of Dickens' story, but not in one of them is a rhinoceros mentioned. For that you have to read the book!

Don't you just love the way he's sitting in that chair? Dickens looks less the famous writer and more like a bored casting director auditioning child actors for a breakfast cereal commercial. 

As was the case with most 19th century novelists, Charles Dickens liked to digress a bit, but even those digressions can be entertaining:

The mention of Marley’s funeral brings me back to the point I started from. There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate. If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet’s Father died before the play began, there would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts, than there would be in any other middle-aged gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy spot—say Saint Paul’s Churchyard for instance—literally to astonish his son’s weak mind.

 
See? Dickens learned the rules of exposition from the Bard himself, and like any good writing teacher, he's passing them on to us.

I'm now going to leave you with my favorite of those digressions:

Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good upon ’Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

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, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Rust in Peace