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A Christmas Carol

From Bah Humbug to God Bless Us Every One: Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Charles Dickens' story of Scrooge's salvation by the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet To Come.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Charles Dickens' novella, written in 1843 when he was 31, which has become intertwined with his reputation and with Christmas itself. Ebenezer Scrooge is the miserly everyman figure whose joyless obsession with money severs him from society and his own emotions, and he is only saved after recalling his lonely past, seeing what he is missing now and being warned of his future, all under the guidance of the ghosts of Christmases Past, Present and Yet To Come. Redeemed, Scrooge comes to care in particular about one of the many minor characters in the story who make a great impact, namely Tiny Tim, the disabled child of the poor and warm-hearted Cratchit family, with his cry, "God bless us, every one!"

With

Juliet John
Professor of English Literature and Dean of Arts and Social Sciences at City, University of London

Jon Mee
Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of York

And

Dinah Birch
Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Cultural Engagement and Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Available now

56 minutes

Last on

Thu 16 Dec 2021 21:30

LINKS AND FURTHER READING

CONTRIBUTORS








READING LIST

Brandon Chitwood, ‘Eternal Returns: A Christmas Carol’s Ghosts of Repetition’ (Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 43, no 4, 2015)

Paul Davis, The Lives and Times of Ebeneezer Scrooge (Yale University Press, 1990)

Charles Dickens, (ed. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst), A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Books (Oxford University Press, 2006)

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Becoming Dickens (Harvard, 2011)

Sergei Eisenstein (ed. Jay Leyda. Harcourt, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory (Mariner Books, 1969), especially ‘Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today’

Fred Guida, A Christmas Carol and Its Adaptations (McFarland & Company, 2000)

Audrey Jaffe, ‘Spectacular Sympathy: Visuality and Ideology in Dickens’s Christmas Carol’ (PMLA, vol. 109, no. 2, 1994)

Juliet John, Dickens and Mass Culture (Oxford University Press, 2010)

Juliet John, Dickens’s Villains: Melodrama, Character Popular Culture (Oxford University Press, 2001)

Sally Ledger and Holly Furneaux (eds), Charles Dickens in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2011)

John Leech (ed.), The Annotated Christmas Carol (Norton, 2003)

Robert Patten et al, The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens (Oxford University Press, 2018)

Michael Slater (ed.), A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings (Penguin Books, 2003)

Grahame Smith, Dickens and the Dream of Cinema (Manchester University Press, 2014)

Claire Tomalin, Charles Dickens: A Life (Viking, 20011)


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  • Thu 16 Dec 2021 09:00
  • Thu 16 Dec 2021 21:30

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