In October 1843, when a financially strapped and depressed Charles Dickens decided to scribble a potboiler in time for Christmas, he had no idea that the rich stew he would concoct would influence our holiday celebrations forever. A Christmas Carol has gone through scores of editions and translations and enough stage, radio, television, and cinema versions to fill an entire year with bah-humbugs and God-bless-us-every-ones. It's success lifted Dickens' spirits, improved sales of his other works, and eventually let him pursue his first love, the theatre.
He formed an acting company and toured Britain and the United States reading from his books, including Carol.
Today his great-great-grandson, Gerald Charles Dickens, carries on this tradition by performing Dickens' works. Every Christmas season since 1997, he has brought to the States his one-man A Christmas Carol, a tour de force in which he depicts 26 characters, some seemingly simultaneously. With only minor costume changes, he becomes waddling and fatuous Mr. Fezziwig, genial nephew Fred, or poor crippled Tiny Tim.
Performing at libraries, dinners, and teas, he bounds off the stage to order astonished audience members out of their chairs while he eats from their plates or wraps them in ghostly chains. The room becomes by turns a dreary counting house, a bustling street, or a snowy country lane. His Ghost of Christmas Present is a jolly Yorkshireman, while Bob Cratchit asks whether it is convenient for him to have Christmas Day off in soft Cornish.
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"The only reason I gave him a Cornish accent was for getting the largest possible difference between Scrooge and Cratchit," Dickens says. "Scrooge has a southern English accent, probably London. It's got that hard edge to it, so I wanted to give Cratchit a very soft voice."
Charles Dickens' Bob Cratchit, of course, came from Camden Town, then a poor London suburb where his creator spent the worst part of his childhood. The author's father, John, persistently lived beyond his means, eventually winding up in debtors' prison while young Charles was forced to work in a blacking factory. Although this period of servitude and ill health lasted only six months, it might have been a lifetime. The stench and horrible conditions of the factory would colour his work forever.
Dickens, of course, went on to become a successful writer. But by 1843 his latest novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, was not selling well.
"It was the first time he had faced up against this in his literary career," says Gerald Dickens. "And it wasn't so much a financial thing, although that was a consideration. But I think he wanted to get back to the sort of fireside jollity of Pickwick Papers. He was getting a little distant from his readers." The plot of A Christmas Carol came ready-made from one of his short stories, The Goblins Who Stole a Sexton.
"It's the story of a wretched gravedigger who was digging graves on Christmas Eve and loving every moment of it.
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