Charles Dickens, 1835-1854
(December 2017)
Every year I mean to read this book at
Christmas, and every year I forget until about December 29th, at
which point the moment has rather passed. I finally got the pitifully small
affair that represents my act together this year, and it was in no way worth
the wait.
He’s not subtle as a writer, is he?
Soporific at points, certainly (though this is as much about the influence of
the passage of time on prose style as Dickens’s writing itself), but never
afraid to assert and reassert and rereassert the Moral of the Story until the
reader has been bludgeoned into shame-faced coma of ethical contrition. The
most notably thing about reading A
Christmas Carol—having obviously been exposed to adaptations of it in
various other media for as long as I can remember—was how Scrooge has basically
repented of all his sins by the midway point of the visit of the Ghost of
Christmas Past, yet we’ve still got two-and-a-half more apparitions’ worth of spectral
hectoring to go.
