Christmas books the sixth & seventh: A Christmas Carol & Dickens at Christmas

[callmemadam]

Yes folks, it is still Christmas for a couple of days.

I need say nothing about A Christmas Carol which I haven’t said before. I read it every Christmas and it never fails to delight.

Dickens at Christmas contains several stories I’d never read before; I bought it when it was 80p for the Kindle. Oh dear. Take out A Christmas Carol, which is included in the collection, and the first part of the book could be re-titled The Worst Of Dickens. I couldn’t finish the extract from The Pickwick Papers but that’s not surprising as it was years before I could get right through the book. I struggled through The Chimes, was totally bemused by The Cricket on the Hearth and nauseated by The Battle of Life. There is so much ammunition here for people who ‘hate Dickens’: facetiousness instead of wit; the use of unnecessary description and twenty words where one would do; sentimentality; melodrama. And yet … You have to remember the audience these stories were written for: the readers of Dickens’ magazines. They wanted stories glorifying home and the angel of the hearth. They expected ghost stories, not necessarily pleasant, at Christmas. They loved to weep over a book. And there are so many flashes of Dickens’ genius. For instance, in the frightening story The Haunted Man there’s a section about the Tetterby family which could have come from one of his best novels.

The essays at the end of the book are the best things in it. A Christmas Tree begins with a wonderful description of Christmas as seen by a child. This is just the kind of thing Dickens excelled at (see David Copperfield or Great Expectations); his vivid memories of his own childhood inspired so much of his writing. To my great surprise, I found a school story here: The Schoolboy’s Story. The school is no Dotheboys Hall but a regular boarding school with much about ‘our fellows’ and the awful food they had to eat. That story could have been written fifty years later.

There is a theme running throughout the stories: Christmas as a special time of peace and love towards all mankind. Dickens doesn’t miss the chance of lecturing the middle classes on the dangers of neglecting the poor, just as the Spirit in A Christmas Carol shows Scrooge the children ‘want’ and ‘ignorance’, who pose a threat to the whole of society. This attitude is most obvious in Nobody’s Story, in which the poor are blamed for what they cannot help.

So I’m glad I read it. You only have to check the tag for ‘Charles Dickens’ to see what a huge admirer I am.

Comments

[gwendraith.livejournal.com]

I love A Christmas Carol and I often read it but not this time. I did watch two versions of the film (Alastair Sim's version and The Muppets). I am a Dickens fan too. As well as the storylines I do like the social history aspect of his books.

[callmemadam.livejournal.com]

Oh I love the Alastair Sim film! Haven't watched it this year, though.

[lethe1]

A Christmas Tree is an essay! That explains it. A little.

I read this three years ago, thinking it was a story, and I couldn't make heads nor tails of the endless summing-up of Christmas tree decorations and then ghost stories. I'm afraid I awarded it only 1 star.

Glad that you also didn't much like The Chimes and The Cricket on the Hearth. I still have one or two more stories to go in the Christmas Books. If The Battle of Life is included I'll know not to expect much! :)

I'm currently re-reading one of my own Christmas staples, Come, Thou Tortoise by Jessica Grant, that I mentioned here once before. It has quickly become one of my all-time favourites.

[callmemadam.livejournal.com]

I think A Christmas Tree is spoiled by the addition of the ghost stories. The Battle of Life (if I'm remembering the right story) is incomprehensible at the beginning and contains *two* women who are like Agnes. Yuk. Dickens did write a terrific ghost story, I think it's called The Railwayman? It gets into almost every anthology of English Short Stories.

I must investigate this Jessica Grant!

[lethe1]

Beware of the review in The Guardian though! Apart from it being one of the few negative ones, it's also spoilerific! It gives away an important plot point that the reader must really find out for themselves, in their own time.

(Why is it that people who didn't enjoy something, such as a book or film, so often do their best to spoil it for everyone else, as well?)

(Last edit, I promise!) The review is by Lucy Ellmann, apparently an author herself. I don't know her. Maybe you do?

[callmemadam.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the warning!

Lucy Ellmann' name is vaguely familiar but I don't really know who she is.