Category Archives: Literature

Literature

P G Wodehouse’s Carry On, Jeeves (1925)

Leave a comment

PG (Sir Pelham Grenville) Wodehouse (1881–1975) was an English author who was one of the most widely read humourists of the 20th century. A prolific writer throughout his life, Wodehouse published more than ninety books and would often have two or more books on the go at any one time. His prose style and subject matter was light and breezy and, in his own words, he wanted to spread “sweetness and light”. Just look at those titles: Nothing Serious, Laughing Gas, Joy in the Morning. With every sparkling joke, every gently innocent character, and every farcical tussle, all set in an idealised world of the 1920s and 30s, Wodehouse whisks us far away from our worries.

He had many fans among the great and the good, including former British prime ministers and many of his fellow writers such as George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh; I seem to remember reading that Lemmy of Motorhead used to read him on his tour bus, post-gig! Although Wodehouse wrote several series of books about various characters such as the Blandings Castle set, the unrufflable monocle-wearing Old Etonian Psmith (with a silent P), and the tall-tale-telling Mr Mulliner, most people will know him for the comic creations, Jeeves and Wooster.

Bertie Wooster is the moneyed young toff who cares little about anything other than fashionable socks, frippery, and tophole societal high jinks, whilst Jeeves is the sagacious valet who clearly has the brains that Bertie lacks and who steers his master through many a social storm. The Jeeves canon consists of 35 short stories and 11 novels, and a wonderful starting point is 1925’s collection of ten short stories, Carry On, Jeeves.

My own introduction to Wodehouse, like many people, was the 1990s TV series Jeeves and Wooster, with Hugh Laurie as Bertie and Stephen Fry as Jeeves. Jeeves and Wooster was a weekly escape into a jazz-age wonderland of art-deco apartments, panelled gentlemen’s clubs, “tissue-restoring” cocktails and buffet breakfasts, all serving as a backdrop to a series of predicaments for Bertie from which he would invariably be extricated by Jeeves. The drama was always held together by fizzing dialogue, peppered with bons mots and not a few neologisms from Wodehouse’s pen.

As befitting a man whose characters and situations had such lightness of being, Wodehouse didn’t take himself too seriously either, as this rejoinder to a critic below shows:

“A certain critic – for such men, I regret to say, do exist – made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained ‘all the old Wodehouse characters under different names’…he will not be able to make a similar charge against Summer Lightning. With my superior intelligence, I have out-generalled the man this time by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names. Pretty silly it will make him feel, I rather fancy.”

Here’s a typical scene from the TV series wherein Bertie finds himself embroiled in a secret love triangle in high danger of imminent exposure and it’s down to Jeeves to pull off a suitably clever rescue.

P G Wodehouse
Literature

HG Wells’s The War Of The Worlds (1898)

Leave a comment

HG (Herbert George) Wells (1866-1946) was a prolific writer with more than fifty novels and dozens of short stories to his name. His output was an eclectic mix, including works of social commentary, politics, history, popular science, satire, biography, and futurism (he foresaw the advent of aircraft, tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons, satellite television and something akin to the World Wide Web) – but of course what he is best remembered for is his science fiction, following the remarkable rapid-fire publication over a four-year period of instant classics The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898).

The War of the Worlds is one of the earliest stories to detail a conflict between mankind and an extra-terrestrial race. It presents itself as a factual account of a Martian invasion as witnessed by the narrator. You know the plot: apparent meteors have rained down around the narrator’s home town of Woking (through which I travelled by train recently, prompting me to make a mental note to write this very blog), but which of course turn out to be far from inorganic space rock, but instead very much not-friendly space aliens bent on destroying humanity.

The first edition was illustrated by British artist Warwick Goble: inky, black-and-white depictions that were eerie, imaginative, exciting, and thoroughly of their late Victorian time. Later, in 1906, the French editions were illustrated by the Brazilian artist Henrique Alvim Corrêa, which turned out to be something of an upgrade, adding to the evocation of Wells’ imagined creatures and their vessels, and of which Wells himself mightily approved.

The War of the Worlds has spawned half a dozen feature films and television series, a record album and musical show (Jeff Wayne, of course), but perhaps the most impactful dramatisation came in the 1938 radio programme directed by and starring Orson Welles. It was very much played for real and if you happened to miss the introductory monologue – which thousands of listeners did – you could be forgiven for thinking the drama was a live newscast of developing events. The programme famously created widespread panic with hordes of people believing that  a real-life Martian invasion was underway right then in North America (Welles had swapped out Woking for Grover’s Mill, New Jersey). It’s easy to scoff at the mass credulousness of the public, but you decide: here’s a clip of the broadcast. Might you have believed it, too?

HG Wells
Literature

Plato’s Allegory Of The Cave (c.375 BC)

Leave a comment

Anyone who has studied philosophy to any reasonable degree will be familiar with the “Father” of philosophy, Plato (c.428-348 BC). Along with this teacher, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato underpins the canon of ancient Greek philosophy and, descending from that, the entire history of Western and Middle Eastern philosophy to this day. Alfred North Whitehead summed up Plato’s enduring influence by characterising the whole of subsequent philosophy as “a series of footnotes to Plato”.

Plato innovated the so-called dialectic method of reasoning by way of dialogues between two or more characters (one of them often being his old teacher Socrates himself) in order to tease out the truth about something. Plato’s Socrates turns many an interlocutor on his head with his acute reasoning, and he’s also a dab hand with allegories: his most famous being found in Plato’s Republic and known as the Allegory of the Cave.

In this allegory Socrates describes a group of prisoners who live their lives chained to the wall of a cave, and facing a blank wall. The prisoners see only shadows projected on the wall by objects passing in front of a fire behind them. The shadows are the prisoners’ reality, but are not accurate representations of the real world; they are merely fragments of reality. Socrates explains that a philosopher is one who seeks to understand and perceive the higher levels of reality and is like the prisoner who is freed from the cave and who comes to understand that the shadows on the wall are not the direct source of the images seen.

There is a thread running between this ancient allegory right up to modern times as science grapples with the fundamental makeup of reality and the possibility of higher dimensions but we needn’t tax ourselves with such deep matters right now. Instead, enjoy this excellent clay animation short which summarises the allegory nicely and is the work of writer and director Michael Ramsay, claymation artist John Grigsby and voice actor Kristopher Hutson.

Plato’s Cave
Literature

Rudyard Kipling’s Rikki-Tikki-Tavi (1894)

Leave a comment

As a child of the sixties, I was exposed to that great 1967 Disney classic, The Jungle Book; I remember being taken to the cinema to watch it and at the end, as the credits rolled, I begged to stay and watch Mowgli, Baloo and Shere Khan all over again (I seem to remember we’d been a bit late and missed the first few minutes so I built my justification upon that; it didn’t work). Meanwhile, at school, a copy of the book on which the film was based was a staple of the class bookcase: Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. Most of the short stories must have been read out to us at one time or another but one in particular stands out in my memory: the tale of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi.

Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, so named for his chattering vocal sounds, was a young Indian grey mongoose who befriends an English family residing in India. He gets to know the other creatures inhabiting the garden and is warned of the cobras Nag and Nagaina (names perhaps inspiring J K Rowling to choose, years later, the name Nagini for Voldemort’s snake), who are angered by the human family’s presence in their territory and seek to kill them

Accordingly, Nag enters the house’s bathroom before dawn to kill the humans, but Rikki attacks Nag from behind in the darkness. The ensuing struggle awakens the family, and the father kills Nag with a shotgun blast while Rikki bites down on the hood of the struggling male cobra. The grieving female snake Nagaina attempts revenge against the humans, cornering them as they have breakfast on a veranda, but again Rikki saves the day, pursuing Nagaina to her underground nest where an unseen final battle takes place. Rikki emerges triumphant from the hole, and dedicates his life to guarding the garden.

The stories in The Jungle Book were inspired in part by ancient Indian fable texts such as the Panchatantra and the Jataka tales, and indeed there is a similar mongoose and snake version of the Rikki-Tikki-Tavi story found in Book 5 of Panchatantra. Kipling’s “beast tales” were thus the revival of an old tradition, with Kipling’s own spin gleaned from his experiences growing up in India for the first five years of his life (and with a hearty dollop of abandonment issues, perhaps, after Kipling was sent back to England for an unhappy period, but that’s another story). Here are the opening lines to the story.

THIS is the story of the great war that Rikki-tikki-tavi fought single-handed, through the bath-rooms of the big bungalow in Segowlee cantonment. Darzee, the tailor-bird, helped him, and Chuchundra, the muskrat, who never comes out into the middle of the floor, but always creeps round by the wall, gave him advice; but Rikki-tikki did the real fighting.

He was a mongoose, rather like a little cat in his fur and his tail, but quite like a weasel in his head and his habits. His eyes and the end of his restless nose were pink; he could scratch himself anywhere he pleased, with any leg, front or back, that he chose to use; he could fluff up his tail till it looked like a bottle-brush, and his war-cry as he scuttled through the long grass, was: “Rikk-tikk-tikki-tikki-tchk!“

One day, a high summer flood washed him out of the burrow where he lived with his father and mother, and carried him, kicking and clucking, down a roadside ditch. He found a little wisp of grass floating there, and clung to it till he lost his senses. When he revived, he was lying in the hot sun on the middle of a garden path, very draggled indeed, and a small boy was saying: “Here’s a dead mongoose. Let’s have a funeral.”

“No,” said his mother; “let’s take him in and dry him. Perhaps he isn’t really dead.”

They took him into the house, and a big man picked him up between his finger and thumb and said he was not dead but half choked; so they wrapped him in cotton-wool, and warmed him, and he opened his eyes and sneezed.

“Now,” said the big man (he was an Englishman who had just moved into the bungalow); “don’t frighten him, and we’ll see what he’ll do.”

It is the hardest thing in the world to frighten a mongoose, because he is eaten up from nose to tail with curiosity. The motto of all the mongoose family is, “Run and find out”; and Rikki-tikki was a true mongoose. He looked at the cotton-wool, decided that it was not good to eat, ran all round the table, sat up and put his fur in order, scratched himself, and jumped on the small boy’s shoulder.

“Don’t be frightened, Teddy,” said his father. “That’s his way of making friends.”

“Ouch! He’s tickling under my chin,” said Teddy.

Rikki-tikki looked down between the boy’s collar and neck, snuffed at his ear, and climbed down to the floor, where he sat rubbing his nose.

Rikki-Tikki-Tavi book cover
Rudyard Kipling
Literature

Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot (1950)

Leave a comment

A few blogs back I wrote about the fantasy world of Ursula K Le Guin and recalled the appeal of browsing the array of science fiction book covers on the shelves at WH Smith’s. One of the giants of that genre – and one that I actually went to the trouble of reading – was Isaac Asimov.

Born in Smolensk in 1920, Asimov was the son of Jewish parents who emigrated to the US in 1923, and the young Isaac was brought up in Brooklyn, New York, where he helped his father run a sweet shop (a “candy store”, I suppose). It was there that he was first exposed to the classic Amazing Stories magazines that his father also stocked, and he was soon diving into the fantastic worlds of Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe, and writing short stories of his own.

Although Asimov’s writing career for many years played second fiddle to his professional scientific career (he became a lecturer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University), his output of science fiction was nonetheless prodigious, and eventually the glut of ideas and the success of his writing encouraged him to become a full-time author. My exposure to Isaac Asimov came in the form of his Robot series, notably I, Robot, which my memory tells me I inherited, rather than bought, probably from my Uncle Geoff.

Asimov wrote 37 short stories and six novels about robots and in fact had coined the term “robotics” in a 1941 story. He also came up with his famous and influential “Three Laws of Robotics”:

  1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
  2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
  3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

These Three Laws of Robotics, which Asimov‘s robots were supposed to obey, have resounded down the ages to the present day when the modern preoccupation with artificial intelligence toys with the idea that those laws might be breached, as they clearly were in The Terminator!

Here’s a selection of book covers that gave many an illustrator free rein to portray Asimov’s robotic world, and starting with the brilliant Terminator-like cover that I remember having.

Isaac Asimov
Literature

Jack Kerouac’s On The Road (1957)

Leave a comment

Back in late 1987 I set off backpacking around the world for several months, a most amazing experience that I could write a lot about but won’t as the point I wanted to make was that travelling presents a multitude of opportunities to read books. In the back of the journal I was keeping, I listed all the books that I had been reading along the way, on buses, in hotel rooms, and on the beach, and it’s interesting to me to review that list as I peruse it now. I’m quite impressed: I see some classics of the dystopian genre (Orwell, Huxley, Kafka), some great American literature (Hemingway, John Irving, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut), some stars of Brit Lit (Graham Greene, G K Chesterton, John Fowles, William Golding), and of course there had to be a classic about travel and freedom…and that classic was Jack Kerouac’s On The Road.

On the Road was based on Kerouac’s travels with his buddies across the United States in the late 1940s. Being a voracious writer, Kerouac had channelled reams of stream-of-consciousness narrative (he called it “spontaneous prose”) into multiple notebooks and then spent a three-week period in April 1951 copying them all out into one long reel of writing; it would eventually be published in 1957 and become one of the great American novels of the 20th century, the crowning glory of the burgeoning Beat movement.

The novel is a roman à clef, meaning that, whilst its story and characters represent real events and people, it is written with a façade of fiction, and his buddies (William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, themselves key figures of the Beat Generation) appear as fictional characters, with Kerouac himself cast as the novel’s narrator Sal Paradise. The plot is centred around several road trips that the protagonists undergo, and the chaotic adventures they experience.

The narrative is full of Americana which appeals to my romantic side (indeed, it was the image of the Wichita linesman in my last blog that got me thinking about On The Road in the first place). We read about long roads and highways, Cadillacs and Ford Sedans, cheap motels and Skid Row, nightclubs and bars, jazz and poetry, drugs and bordellos, and along the way get acquainted with forties New York, San Francisco, New Orleans, Chicago and St Louis and a myriad other towns and cities of America.

Although my own travel journal remains little more than a log of events, of interest only to me, Kerouac’s journals turned into a tour de force of literature and a fascinating insight into America’s counterculture.

Jack Kerouac
Literature

Marcel Proust’s In Search Of Lost Time (1913)

Leave a comment

In Search of Lost Time (French: À la recherche du temps perdu) is a monumental novel in seven volumes by French author Marcel Proust, written between 1909 and the author’s death in 1922. Weighing in at 3200 pages, it really is a magnum opus and indeed was Proust’s life’s work (his only other novel, the earlier Jean Santeuil, was unfinished and was something of a prototype since it contained many of the themes and motifs that he would deploy later). So, has your blogger gone above and beyond and read the whole thing? Of course not! However, I have recently read volume one, Swann’s Way, and judging by the quality of writing and the enjoyable way I was sucked into his world, who knows, I may yet attempt the whole series, in time.

My version is in English of course, rather than the original French, and so a word should be said about the quality of the translation. This definitive translation was rendered by Scotsman C K Scott Moncrieff whose job it was to use the appropriate phraseology and le mot juste to reliably capture the essence of the Proustian text in English. To illustrate how this may differ, consider his original title Remembrance of Things Past, compared with what publishers latterly decided upon, the more literal In Search of Lost Time.

The theme of the book is signalled by this title: the nature of memory. Despite the book being fictional, Proust’s childhood and early adulthood in late 19th century and early 20th century high society France must have been plundered prodigiously: the detail is extraordinary and you could be forgiven for believing you are reading a true autobiography, and that the fictional town of Combray, in which most of the events take place, was a real French town. Throughout the book are instances of “involuntary memory”, that is, vivid memories conjured up for the narrator by sensory experiences such as sights, sounds and smells. Perhaps the most famous of these occurs early in Swann’s Way, namely the “episode of the madeleine”, which I reproduce here:

No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory—this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. … Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? … And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea.

Marcel Proust
Literature

Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird (1960)

Leave a comment

If you’re going to write just one book, it’s a pretty good outcome if that novel – To Kill A Mockingbird – goes on to win the 1961 Pulitzer Prize, become the twentieth century’s most widely read American novel, and which still sells about a million copies annually today. Harper Lee (1926-2016) did just that (OK quibblers, she did publish a second novel in 2015, Go Set A Watchman, which was written before Mockingbird and touted as a prequel but this was essentially a first draft of To Kill A Mockingbird).

Harper Lee (1926-2016) grew up in Monroeville, Alabama, and had a lawyer father who once defended two black men, a father and son, who had been accused of murdering a white storekeeper. Both men were hanged. So you see, the young Nelle (Harper was her middle name and was only used as her pen name) had ample material with which to work in her novel about the irrationality of attitudes towards race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s, as seen through children’s eyes.

To Kill a Mockingbird takes place in the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama, during the Great Depression. The protagonist is Jean Louise (“Scout”) Finch, an intelligent and courageous young girl who ages from six to nine years old during the course of the novel. She is raised with her brother, Jeremy (“Jem”), by their widowed father, Atticus Finch, who is a prominent lawyer. Atticus encourages his children to be empathetic and just, notably telling them that it is “a sin to kill a mockingbird,” alluding to the fact that the birds are innocent and harmless.

When Tom Robinson, one of the town’s black residents, is falsely accused of raping Mayella Ewell, a white woman, Atticus agrees to defend him despite threats from the community. At one point he faces a mob intent on lynching his client but refuses to abandon him. Scout unwittingly diffuses the situation. Although Atticus presents a defence that gives a more plausible interpretation of the evidence—that Mayella was attacked by her father, Bob Ewell—Tom is convicted, and he is later killed while trying to escape custody.

Here’s an extract from the scene just mentioned, in which Scout diffuses the situation with the mob (led by Walter Cunningham).

“Hey, Mr. Cunningham.”

The man did not hear me, it seemed.

“Hey, Mr. Cunningham. How’s your entailment gettin‘ along?”

Mr. Walter Cunningham’s legal affairs were well known to me; Atticus had once described them at length. The big man blinked and hooked his thumbs in his overall straps. He seemed uncomfortable; he cleared his throat and looked away. My friendly overture had fallen flat.

Mr. Cunningham wore no hat, and the top half of his forehead was white in contrast to his sun-scorched face, which led me to believe that he wore one most days. He shifted his feet, clad in heavy work shoes.

“Don’t you remember me, Mr. Cunningham? I’m Jean Louise Finch. You brought us some hickory nuts one time, remember?” I began to sense the futility one feels when unacknowledged by a chance acquaintance.

“I go to school with Walter,” I began again. “He’s your boy, ain’t he? Ain’t he, sir?”

Mr. Cunningham was moved to a faint nod. He did know me, after all.

“He’s in my grade,” I said, “and he does right well. He’s a good boy,” I added, “a real nice boy. We brought him home for dinner one time. Maybe he told you about me, I beat him up one time but he was real nice about it. Tell him hey for me, won’t you?”

Atticus had said it was the polite thing to talk to people about what they were interested in, not about what you were interested in. Mr. Cunningham displayed no interest in his son, so I tackled his entailment once more in a last-ditch effort to make him feel at home.

“Entailments are bad,” I was advising him, when I slowly awoke to the fact that I was addressing the entire aggregation. The men were all looking at me, some had their mouths half-open. Atticus had stopped poking at Jem: they were standing together beside Dill. Their attention amounted to fascination. Atticus’s mouth, even, was half-open, an attitude he had once described as uncouth. Our eyes met and he shut it.

“Well, Atticus, I was just sayin‘ to Mr. Cunningham that entailments are bad an’ all that, but you said not to worry, it takes a long time sometimes… that you all’d ride it out together…” I was slowly drying up, wondering what idiocy I had committed. Entailments seemed all right enough for living-room talk.

I began to feel sweat gathering at the edges of my hair; I could stand anything but a bunch of people looking at me. They were quite still.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

Atticus said nothing. I looked around and up at Mr. Cunningham, whose face was equally impassive. Then he did a peculiar thing. He squatted down and took me by both shoulders.

“I’ll tell him you said hey, little lady,” he said.

Then he straightened up and waved a big paw. “Let’s clear out,” he called. “Let’s get going, boys.”

Harper Lee

 

Literature

Ursula K Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea (1968)

Leave a comment

As a teenager I was intrigued by the prodigious output of science fiction writers that you could find lining the shelves at WH Smiths – Isaac Asimov, Michael Moorcock, Robert A Heinlein, Frank Herbert and so on – often with appealing, other-worldly artwork on their covers. Alongside sci-fi you also had the related genre of science-fantasy, or straight-up “fantasy”, which differs from sci-fi in the fact that, whilst the latter remains technically in a world of scientific possibility, science fantasy allows for violation of the scientific laws of the real world, thus encompassing all the “sword and sorcery” fiction from Tolkien to Robert E Howard’s Conan The Barbarian novels.

Thanks to Tolkien (I first read The Lord of the Rings somewhere in my mid-teens), it was science fantasy to which I leaned, if I had to choose, but even then I wasn’t what you’d call a real fan of the genre. I was too eclectic, I suppose, busy collecting thrillers by the likes of Alistair Maclean or Jack Higgins, or horror fiction by James Herbert, or gritty pulp like Richard Stark’s Parker novels or Don Pendleton’s The Executioner series – more killing bad guys than slaying dragons, shall we say?

However, another name I recall seeing on those book shelves (but which never read until relatively recently) was that of Ursula K Le Guin (1929–2018), an American author known for both science fiction works set in her “Hainish” universe, and science fantasy in her extraordinary Earthsea series. It was the latter I discovered a few years ago when I purchased her Earthsea Quartet on a whim and found myself amazed and thrilled by her story-telling. There is nothing throwaway about Le Guin’s novels, no production-line fantasy, these; they are literary works that weave an extraordinary world which has obviously been taken seriously and comprehensively thought through.

The Earthsea world is one of sea and islands, a vast archipelago meticulously mapped out at the beginning of the book, in which its inhabitants understand that magic is a real thing, an in-built talent common to all though highly-developed only in some, particularly those trained at the school at Roke (Earthsea’s school of wizardry created long before Hogwarts). There are “weather workers” and “fixers”, and various low-level magical specialities…and then there are the cream of the crop, the card-carrying wizards, like the protagonist Ged (also known as Sparrowhawk), who go by the title of “Mage”.

In the first book, A Wizard of Earthsea, the young Ged, on the island of Gont, overhears his maternal aunt, the village witch, using “words of power” to attract goats. He tries it himself, to surprising effect, and his aunt recognises Ged’s exceptionalism. By the age of twelve he has learned everything his aunt can teach him, and so the journey begins. I love the nuanced magic: instead of those dramatic electric-bolt battles between Gandalf and Saruman, or Harry Potter and Voldemort, we see Ged using a “mage wind” to power a boat forward when the wind fails. It’s altogether a more subtle kind of magic. A more believable kind, in fact, even if it is just “fantasy”.

The Earthsea Quartet book cover
Ursula K Le Guin
Literature

Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843)

2 Comments

Charles Dickens is widely regarded as the greatest writer of the Victorian era, and he certainly came up with some enduring fictional characters. As an aside, I recall the menu at the Outside Inn bistro in my home town as being a rich source of these: I used to get the Bill Sykes burger (smothered in chilli) but there was also a Mr Micawber, a Tiny Tim (served with salad rather than chips), a Treble Bumble and so on. Everyone has seen the 1974 film version of Oliver Twist on numerous occasions of course, but it’s remarkable just how often Dickens’ novels have been made into films; David Copperfield, for example, has been filmed eight times (in 1911, 1913, 1922, 1935, 1969, 1993, 1999 and 2000). Similarly, there are six film versions each of Great Expectations, The Old Curiosity Shop and A Tale of Two Cities.

When it comes to A Christmas Carol, however, its enduring popularity hits the stratosphere: there are no less than thirteen ‘straight’ film versions (as in, named A Christmas Carol), as well as six or seven more featuring the name ‘Scrooge’ in some form or another, and numerous spin-off and parody versions from the Smurfs to the Muppets (the latter is surprisingly excellent, incidentally). It is therefore highly unlikely that you will need the following synopsis; nonetheless, for the sake of newly-arrived extra-terrestrial readers of this blog:  A Christmas Carol recounts the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, an elderly miser who is visited by the ghost of his former business partner Jacob Marley and the spirits of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come. After their visits, Scrooge is transformed into a kinder, gentler man.

Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol during a period when the country was exploring and re-evaluating its past Christmas traditions, including carols and newer customs such as Christmas trees. He was influenced by the experiences of his own youth and by other writers including Washington Irving and Douglas Jerrold. He was particularly inspired by a visit to the Field Lane Ragged School, one of several establishments for London’s street children. The treatment of the poor and the ability of a selfish man to redeem himself by transforming into a more sympathetic character are of course the key themes of the story.

Published on 19 December 1843, the first edition sold out by Christmas Eve, and it has never been out of print since. Dickens even began performing public recitations of the story at various venues throughout London, which proved to be a big hit with the public. The novella thus captured the zeitgeist of the mid-Victorian revival of the Christmas holiday and helped create the archetypes that were handed down to later generations, like family gatherings, seasonal food and drink, dancing, games and a festive generosity of spirit.

Here is a nice montage from the 1951 film, Scrooge, featuring Alistair Sim (making a second appearance in this blog; see An Inspector Calls) as Ebenezer Scrooge. Rather than the curmudgeon, let’s see the redeemed Scrooge as the Christmas spirit finally takes hold within him. Sim captures the pathos masterfully: prepare for a warm feeling!

To all my readers, Merry Christmas!

Charles Dickens