A Christmas Carol

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A Christmas Carol Dramaturgy

Scenic Rendering and Set Model by Howard C. Jones

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Marley

Christmas Past

Fred, Edwina, Hortence and Topper

Mr. and Mrs. Fezziwig

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A Christmas Carol Dramaturgy

Dramaturg Drew Barker has created a Google site with more information about Charles Dickens and A Christmas Carol, as well as Christmas traditions and Victorian London.
Click here to visit our A Christmas Carol Google site.

 

A History of A Christmas Carol

“ I have endeavored in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an idea, which shall not put my readers out of humor with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it. ”
–Charles Dickens, epigraph of A Christmas Carol

“Mr. Fezziwig’s Ball” A Christmas Carol in Prose, 1843.

The Christmas spirit and festivities had actually been languishing in England since the Puritanical dismissal in the 17th century of anything that resembled old pagan celebrations or symbols, like special winter feasts or decorating one’s home or church with holly. The Industrial Revolution also did not help matters when employers frequently ran their factories through Christmas Day.

Fortunately, a revival of sorts began in the early Victorian period which popularized studies of old Christmas traditions which in turn led to more Christmas stories.

Christmas flourished to unprecedented extent during the mid 19th century, and Dickens, though not creator of it all, is certainly one of the greatest Fathers of Christmas. The way Dickens enshrined not only family, but more specifically children and the poor during the holiday season, directly contributed to the traditions present nowadays in Britain and America. A Christmas Carol itself became a tradition with families reading it during the holidays or attending the many adaptations for the stage or screen that have sprung up perennially since its inception.

As Christmas traditions reemerged, Victorians began the shift of placing focus on children and making them the heart of the holiday. From Oliver Twist to Great Expectations, Dickens’ writings are infused with portraits of children in joy or hard times. This is evident in A Christmas Carol when Scrooge is first visiting his own childhood and seeing his own abandonment in the empty schoolhouse when all the other children are with their families, which prompts him to regret not showing kindness to the young carolers earlier that evening. Centering this theatrical production around children echoes Dickens own desire to have Christmas revolve around children as well.

That same spirit of reformation and reclamation that animates A Christmas Carol helped revive the Christmas traditions in England. The reviews from the time confirm Dickens’ purpose:

“If ever a writer deserved public honours for the service he has rendered to his kind, that man is Charles Dickens, and the Christmas Carol should be read and reverenced in all time to come as a glorious manual of Christian duties.”
–The Magazine of Domestic Economy and Family Review, January 1844

“Dickens has here converted an incredible fiction into one of the strongest exhibitions of religious and moral truth, and into one of the most picturesque poetical allegories which we possess in our language.”
–Bell’s Weekly Messenger, December 1843

“Mr. Dickens has made the world a Christmas present, which will increase its merriment at this festive season of the year, and which is far better, teach it an important lesson… everyone will read the book; and, if they will take our advice,
as quickly as they can.”
–The Unitarian Inquirer, December 1843

William Makepeace Thackeray wrote his review for the London Morning Chronicle (December 24, 1845) of a later Dickens’ Christmas story, The Cricket on the Hearth, and described the purpose Dickens’ Christmas Books as “to startle, to keep on amusing his reader; to ply him with brisk sentences, rapid conceits, dazzling pictures, adroit interchange of pathos and extravaganza.” Thackeray elaborated later by proclaiming Dickens as the “chief literary master of ceremonies for Christmas… who understands the kindess and joviality and withal the pathos of the season.”

Since its publication in 1843, Dickens’ story has been reprinted, staged, pirated, mimed, marionetted, filmed, and choreographed countless times—all of which is a testament to the story’s humanitarian appeal. In fact, because of its popularity (and because of lack of copyright protection) there were 12 stage productions of the novella by the end of 1844—with only one playwright actually collaborating with Dickens.

(Quotations taken from The Annotated Christmas Carol: A Christmas Carol in Prose by Charles Dickens; Illustrated by John Leech; with an introduction, notes, and bibliography by Michael Patrick Hearn.)