Plain Talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

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I have just finished reading a Times book supplement that I should have read a while back -- in December 2005, to be exact, when it came out. The supplement is almost entirely devoted to Charles Dickens whose Christmas Carol has long been a favourite with children, having been produced as a play, a pantomime and a film.

A number of well-known writers, actors and directors contributed to the issue. In her introductory note, editor Erica Wagner writes, "If you happen to be a literary editor, people will ask you with some frequency what your favourite book is. While such a choice is invidious -- made by anyone -- I wouldn't find it hard to choose A Christmas Carol."

This, I would add, is my own choice too. I have lost count of how many times I have read the story, or how many times I told it to my son when he was a child in London, eagerly awaiting Father Christmas and his stocking.

I should single out from among the contributors to the supplement Peter Ackroyd, not only because I have read his book Dickens, but because I have followed his writings in the English press. Ackroyd tells us that Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol very quickly, "as he always did when he was held in the grip of inspiration." The idea for the story came when, towards the end of October 1843, he was travelling from London to Manchester, where he was to make a speech to a group of labouring men and women of the city. Ackroyd remarks "It was a cause in which he was wholly and passionately involved, and it can be said with some truth that his Christmas fable -- the first of a number of Christmas stories he wrote -- was born out of the conditions of the time."

In fact, this applies to most, if not all, of Dickens' novels, notably Oliver Twist. His characters were the poor and ragged and the desperate. He had the habit of visiting schools in the poor quarters of London and other cities. "I have very seldom seen," he wrote of one of his visits, "in all the strange and dreadful things I have seen in London and elsewhere, anything so shocking as the dire neglect of soul and body exhibited in these children."

Ackroyd believes that Scrooge's childhood is a reworking of Dickens' own. The family depicted in the Carol "lives in a small terraced house in Bayham Street, Islington, where Dickens and his family had once lived."

Actor Simon Callow discusses the theatricality of A Christmas Carol. Apparently Dickens began by reading the story in public before the book was published. He performed it to a group of friends gathered at lodgings in Lincoln's Inn Field. Dickens was in the habit of performing sections of his work-in- progress to friends, but this text, more than any other he had written, lent itself to public reading.

Designating the text as "a highly theatrical piece," Callow describes its tone as "chatty, informal, discursive." Dickens is quoted as saying that "whatever brings a public man and his public face to face is a good thing... it is my great privilege and pride, as it is my great responsibility to hold with a multitude of persons who will never hear my voice or see my face." It appears that it was Dickens who invented the public reading that has now become so fashionable.

This brings me to Patrick Stewart who describes how he gave his first public reading of A Christmas Carol, without any cuts. Although it lasted for three hours, in mid-December, the audience was rapt: "Nobody stirred. Nobody moved... What I experienced then convinced me that there is something very potent going on in that book, something that grabbed people and held their attention."