A Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens
(Puffin)
A Christmas Carol is arguably the most adapted book in history. While Patrick Stewart beamed down from the Starship Enterprise with his one-man show, Kelsey Grammar began life after Frasier with a frenetically awful song-and-dance version.
Who needs television reruns when you can buy a DVD of Alistair Sim's seminal performance or Albert Finney's excellent portrayal? Bill Murray updated Scrooge for the Reagan generation (Scrooged), and Rowan Atkinson's Blackadder inverted the story for Thatcherite Britain. The Muppets did it their way.
With all this choice, it is easy to forget Dickens' original. First published in 1843 (between Martin Chuzzlewit and Dombey and Son), it is the author's howl of horror at children condemned to a doomed childhood. In A Christmas Carol, this evil fills the workhouses, fuels the terrible vision of Want and Ignorance and ensures that Tiny Tim's life is tiny indeed.
The story is too famous to require much recapitulation: a misanthropic miser finds redemption after three ghosts (of Christmases Past, Present and Future) cause his pathetic life to flash before his eyes. What does bear some repeating is the sheer glory of Dickens' prose, which was never more atmospheric, musical or more moving than here.
