"A TALE TO MAKE THE READER LAUGH AND CRY"

Every year, around December, I find an excuse write something about what is, unquestionably my favourite books: Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.

This year, on account of the show David and staged at the British Library, I have already bored you with my thoughts on the tale of Ebenezer Scrooge, "a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner" who – through the intervention of a series of ghostly interviews – turns away from his miserly past towards a present and a future filled with the joyful happiness symbolised by Christmas.

A Christmas Carol was first published on this day in 1843, and was an instantaneous triumph. It became – and has remained for the past 168 years – a national (and international) treasure!

A contemporary reviewer said of it that it was "a tale to make the reader laugh and cry – to open his hands, and open his heart to charity even toward the uncharitable..."

On the book's publication, Thomas Hood wrote: "If Christmas, with its ancient and hospitable customs, its social and charitable observances, were ever in danger of decay, this is the book that would give them a new lease. The very name of the author predisposes one to the kindlier feelings; and a peep at the Frontispiece sets the animal spirits capering..."


Some years ago, now, I wrote A Christmas Carol: The Unsung Story, an entire book about Dickens' "ghost story of Christmas", partly inspired by decades of collecting various editions and versions of the story in all types of media and partly by Humbug!, a programme that I wrote and presented on BBC Radio 4 (according to my fellow Caroller, Mr Boll Weavil) on 22 December 1987.

On Christmas Day, 1993 – to mark the 150th anniversary of the original publication – a revised version of Humbug! was broadcast and – as I did at this time last year –I'm posting a recording of it on today's blog.

So, pour yourself a seasonal glass of something, heat up some mince pies, take a break from the pre-Christmas rush-and-tear and get into the spirit of the season with what, I hope, is still a mildly interesting account of how and why Charles Dickens was inspired to write what is, surely, his most famous book.

Along the way, you can enjoy some of the many interpretations – good, bad and downright ugly – that have been perpetrated over the years. And, after you have listened to some of these well-known, lesser-known and, sometimes, downright unlikely Scrooges, I defy all but the flintiest-hearted of you to say...

"HUMBUG!"

Images: Caricature of Charles Dickens by David Levine; Bob Cratchit & Tiny Tim by Fred Barnard, c. 1870; Scrooge and Marley's Ghost by John Leech, 1843.

BOYS WILL BE GIRLS

A passing mention of Pantomimes the other day (specifically about a show that was not a panto) reminded me that I've an old photo that I want to share...

It came from David Drummond – of that treasure-house of showbiz memorabilia from bygone eras, Pleasures of Past Times – with whom I presented a recent evening on pantos at The Magic Circle.

As a child, I was mystified by the tradition of Dames being played by men and the leading men, or 'Principle Boys' (Aladdins, Robin Hoods, Robinson Crusoes and Dick Wittingtons), being played by GIRLS!

I always thought there was something a bit odd about the courtship between Snow White, Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty and the long-legged, bossomy lasses who were playing their Princes; but I have to say this image of music hall entertainer Fanny Robina in her 1907 Principle Boy get-up, stretches credulity pretty much to breaking point!

"Oh, no it doesn't!"

"Oh, yes it does!"

No wonder I grew up a bit confused about gender attraction issues!

THE LADY IS A GENT

I can't remember when I had a more enjoyable night at the theatre than our recent visit to the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, London, to see the new musical version of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Ernest with the absurdly talented Gyles Brandreth as the redoubtable Lady Bracknell...

Wilde's greatest play – throughout the evening, the brilliant (and justly famous) lines cascade like a shimmering of shooting stars – has been gently updated from Victorian society to the 1920s and embellished with musical numbers (by lyricist, Douglas Livingstone and composers Adam McGuinness and Zia Moranne) that capture all the wit of the original and drive the plot through a two-hour running time that whistles by with carefree abandon.

Just as My Fair Lady feels like the show George Bernard Shaw would have written if he had been making Pygmalion as a musical, this is unquestionably Oscar Wilde's all-singing (and, with the aid of some nifty choreography) all-dancing Ernest.

Directed by Iqbal Khan, it exceeded my expectations (and silenced a few nagging doubts) chiefly because the writers and cast treat the original with respect and love in equal measure and – cavorting in a stylised set (an array of luggage containing pop-up trees and bushes) that adds its own charm to the frothy proceedings – manage to convey the importance of personal and social identity underlying the frivolity and the playwright's ruthless mockery of the more absurd manners of his day.

The actors playing the quartet of young lovers – Mark Edel-Hunt, Anya Murphy, Colin Ryan and Flora Spencer-Longhurst – acquit themselves splendidly, despite having to share the stage with the scene-stealing Edward Petherbridge and Susie Blake as a shyly, slyly, flirtatious Dr Chasuble and Miss Prism; Stefan Bednarczyk, the show's musical director, as a brace of butlers (town and country); and Mr Brandreth's imperious juggernaut of a Bracknell – every inch a lady, with the regal ramrod uprightness of the late Queen Mary.

Despite the cross-dressing, Brandreth's Bracknell is absolutely not a pantomime dame, she is as far from the much caricatured Edith Evans portrayal as it is possible to get. The much-anticipated two-word line (one of the best-known speeches in theatre) is not only delivered with the appropriate degree of incredulity but is a prologue to a patter song about handbags that carries the moment to new heights of humour.

And when her ladyship tempers her sharply cutting comments with warm twinklings of care and compassion, it is impossible not to believe that beneath the steely exterior a few memories yet remain of the heart-flutterings of her own youth.

The Importance of Being Ernest only runs until 31 December: so book before the word gets fully out that this is the don't-miss show of the Christmas season – and if you can't book a ticket, well, then beg, borrow or steal one!

And while on the subject of Messrs Brandreth and Wilde, let me enthusiastically recommend Gyles' brilliant series of literary thrillers The Oscar Wilde Murder Mysteries, the most recent of which is Oscar Wilde and the Vatican Murders.

Photo: Clara Molden

SOCIETY SNAPPER

A new exhibition at Chris Beetles Fine Photographyre-affirms the late Patrick (Lord) Lichfield was one of Britain's great photographers, with an uncanny knack for capturing striking images across the different classes from royalty to the common folk!

His seemingly unobserved snap of Charles Chaplin and Marlon Brando – Chaplin hand on heart, Brando, hand on Chaplin's arm...


...is as revealing of character as his self-consciously informal (and, ironically, unsympathetic) portrait of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor....


... and his study of a gloomy-looking Sunday morning speaker at Hyde Park Corner...


A few photos seem a tad too obviously staged, such as this one of Joanna Lumley (as, I assume, Purdy in The New Avengers) but even here Lichfield creates a fantastic effect with the sunlight through the leaves of the tree...


...while this portrait of Dirk Bogarde (glimpsed, smoking, through a haze of wine-bottles) seems more candid than knowing...


Two of my favourite images from this exhibition are a Gurkha soldier standing sentry duty outside St James's Palace in the snow....


....and Lichfield's snap of Elizabeth Taylor snapping Elizabeth the Queen Mother at a Garden Party. It is, I think, the world-weary look on the face of the passing waitress that makes it such a fantastic shot...


The exhibition, Patrick Lichfield: Perceptions can be viewed until 7 January 2011 at

Chris Beetles Fine Photographs, 3-5 Swallow Street, London, W1B 4DE, Tel: 020 7434 4319

Gallery opening times: Monday-Saturday, 10:00-17:30

"STOP THE FRAME I WANT TO GET OUT!"

I've always loved stop-motion animation and this film - Sorry, I'm Late by blink - is a mini-masterpiece...

Like all animation, stop-motion is a hellishly time-consuming process. If you're as intrigued as I was by how it was done, visit blink's website to see making of photos and videos.

And thanks to Irascible Ian for telling me about Sorry, I'm Late.

...AS A DOOR-NAIL!

Another thing I love about Dickens, is his profligate use of parenthetical observations: the digressions and asides that are so much a part of his conversational style.

Take the beginning of The Chimes. Five words in on his opening sentence, Dickens sets off on a sixty-three word long parenthesis as can be seen in this colour-coded extract:

There are not many people – and as it is desirable that a story-teller and a story-reader should establish a mutual understanding as soon as possible, I beg it to be noticed that I confine this observation neither to young people nor to little people, but extend it to all conditions of people: little and big, young and old: yet growing up, or already growing down again – there are not, I say, many people who would care to sleep in a church.

Similarly, on the opening page of A Christmas Carol:

Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail. Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Incidentally, Dickens was correct in identifying the phrase 'as dead as a door-nail' as being one of great antiquity. One of several earliest uses of the expression (and the only one of a known date) is in William Langland's The Vision of Piers Plowman, written inn 1362: "Fey withouten fait is febelore þen nouȝt, And ded as a dore-nayl."

Shakespeare puts the phrase in Jack Cade's mouth in his 1592 play, King Henry VI, Part 2:

Brave thee! ay, by the best blood that ever was
broached, and beard thee too. Look on me well: I
have eat no meat these five days; yet, come thou and
thy five men, and if I do not leave you all as dead
as a doornail, I pray God I may never eat grass more.

But why, as Dickens asks, are door-nails deader than say a coffin-nail? Maybe, as one on-line source suggest:

Door-nails are the large-headed studs that were used in earlier times for strength and more recently as decoration. The practice was to hammer the nail through and then bend over the protruding end to secure it. This process, similar to riveting, was called clenching. This may be the source of the 'deadness', as such a nail would be unusable afterwards.

Anyway, if you want to find out just how dead Marley was – and what happened as a result – there are still tickets available (heaven only knows why!) for A Christmas Carol and the Conjuror, a seasonal entertainment by David Weeks and myself that combines Dickens' 1858 Public Reading version of the saga of Ebenezer Scrooge with amazing magical interludes. The event is being held at the British Library Conference Centre, tonight at 6:30 and tomorrow, Saturday, at 2:30.


Our event was inspired by the British Library's new exhibition, A Hankering After Ghosts: Charles Dickens and the Supernatural.

The exhibition which is on display in the British Library's Folio Society Gallery until 4 March, 2012 as part of the Dickens bicentennial celebrations, explores the many ways in which Dickens used supernatural phenomena in his works, while placing them in the context of scientific, technological and philosophical debates of his time.

Dickens’ interest in the macabre was apparent from an early age. As an adult he was caught up in ‘mesmeric mania’ that swept Britain and developed an interest in the ‘power of the human mind’. He believed that all supernatural manifestations must have rational explanations, but his investigations into animal magnetism and psychology showed him that science could be as chilling as any ghost story. As a result he became wonderfully adept at suspending readers between psychological and supernatural explanations in his fiction.

Which brings us back to the dead Mr Marley...



Images: 'The Spirits of the Bells' by Daniel Maclise from The Chimes (1844); 'Dickens' Dream' by Robert William Buss; and the appearance of Marley's ghost in Scrooge's knocker in A Christmas Carol as seen by Arthur Rackham (1915)

"TO BEGIN WITH..."

Studying the text (once again) of Charles Dickens' famous "ghost story of Christmas" in preparation for David and my performance of A Christmas Carol and the Conjuror at the British Library Conference Centre (Friday 9 December at 6:30 and Saturday 10 December at 2:30), I have been marvelling anew at Dickens' daring and bravado!

Consider the opening of A Christmas Carol:

"Marley was dead: to begin with."

That's how Dickens begins the story.

The sentence has become so familiar to us that it's easy to overlook just how bold an opening that is!

Marley?

Who is Marley?

And doesn't it sound as if we are joining a conversation that started a few moments before we opened the book? A conversation that might have gone something like...

"I'm going to tell you a remarkable story!"

"Oh, what's so remarkable about it?"

"Well, you see, the thing is Marley was dead: to begin with..."

Not only that, but as you read the opening sentence, paragraph and page you discover that this character who is introduced without any introduction is not only dead but is also not the story's chief protagonist, that honour going to Marley's "sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend, his sole mourner", Mr Ebenezer Scrooge!

Dickens' used the same 'mid-conversation' style in a couple of his later 'Christmas Books'. Consider, for example, the opening of A Cricket on the Hearth:

The kettle began it!

Don't tell me what Mrs. Peerybingle said. I know better. Mrs. Peerybingle may leave it on record to the end of time that she couldn't say which of them began it; but, I say the kettle did. I ought to know, I hope! The kettle began it, full five minutes by the little waxy-faced Dutch clock in the corner, before the Cricket uttered a chirp.

"The kettle began it?' Began what? We are instantly intrigued!

Similarly, there is the audacious opening of The Haunted Man:

Everybody said so.

Far be it from me to assert that what everybody says must be true. Everybody is, often, as likely to be wrong as right. In the general experience, everybody has been wrong so often, and it has taken, in most instances, such a weary while to find out how wrong, that the authority is proved to be fallible. Everybody may sometimes be right; "but THAT'S no rule," as the ghost of Giles Scroggins says in the ballad.

The dread word, GHOST, recalls me.

Everybody said he looked like a haunted man. The extent of my present claim for everybody is, that they were so far right. He did.

"Everybody said so."

Everybody said WHAT? About WHO?

It is literary tricks like this that make Dickens such a ruddy genius...

There we are in the noisy, overcrowded room of of Life, merrily (or, possibly, angrily) nattering away to others and taking no particular notice of what Mr Dickens is saying in the corner over there, until, all of a sudden (in a momentary lull in the conversation) we catch hold of a phrase – "Everybody said so..." or "The kettle began it..." or, perhaps, "Marley was dead: to begin with..." and we have absolutely no choice but to stop whatever we are saying or doing and listen to the story he has to tell us!


You can still book tickets for A Christmas Carol and the Conjuror here.

And...

DON'T MISS! The new British Library exhibition, A Hankering After Ghosts: Charles Dickens and the Supernatural which is on show in the Folio Society Gallery until 4 March, 2012.

Images: Scrooge and the Three Spirits by Sol Eytinge; 'The Magician Dickens Invoking the Spirit of Father Christmas' by Kyd (Jospeh Clayton Clarke) from a 1905 edition of The Dickensian.

DISNEY DAY

Today is the 110th birthday of Walter Elias (better known as Walt) Disney...


Last Saturday, I should have been in Manchester with my good friend Robin Allan, author of the wonderfully illuminating Walt Disney and Europe, for 'A Day of Disney' to celebrate the memory of one of the most compelling legacies in worldwide popular culture. With all the 'stuff' life is currently chucking at us, I sadly missed this event which Robin and I launched together many years ago.

So, belatedly for Robin, and for Uncle Walt on the actual date that commemorates his birth in 1901, here's an appropriate birthday greeting...

Caricature of Walt Disney by Vizcarra.

A GLIMMER FROM THE PAST

It's amazing what turns up on YouTube every now and again: such as lost moments of TV that you thought you'd never see again. The other day, I stumbled over myself – well, that is, the me I used to be a decade or two ago! – hosting the BBC TV's then Sunday morning God-slot, First Light.

There's mercifully little of me in this clip: basically just the opening to the programme and my introduction to Adrian Snell and Friends' performance of 'By the Waterfront', an appropriate number for a Sunday morning...

Seeing this snippet of my brief-ish TV career, brought back a lot of memories of working at the BBC studios in Manchester and of being totally thrown in at the deep end of television presentation: learning, amongst other skills, to read auto-cues and take direction via an earpiece... Of course, in those days, I was still young enough to believe I could do anything and never once batted an eye-lid at tackling something new... Nowadays, I'd be a tad more reticent!

Having been told, two days ago, by The Church Next Door (in a outburst of pre-Christmas spirit) that we have to vacate our flat by 27 January, I rather wish I was still presenting a religious current affairs programme!

As a result of the imminent upheaval caused by having to move our joint 60 years of possessions (or, I guess, that should be 120 years) – out, into storage and possibly – at some point in the future, as yet unknown – back in again, is likely to curtail much serious (or even trivial) blogging for a while; but if and when I disappear from view, rest assured I will, eventually, return!

MANY MAGICAL RETURNS

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DAVID!

OK, no time for celebrations - let's get on with rehearsing next week's A Christmas Carol and the Conjuror event at the British Library!

Photograph of David Weeks by Brian Sibley © 2011