"Bah! Humbug!" and "God bless us, every one!" are phrases that have
resounded through the years, instantly recognizable as exclamations
from Scrooge and Tiny Tim in Charles Dickens's beloved Christmas
Carol. Told and retold to generations of children and adults, A
Christmas Carol has been adapted, revised, condensed, added to, and
modernized more than any other work in English literature. In this
engaging and delightfully illustrated book, Paul Davis explores the
various British and American versions of this work--on stage, film,
radio, and television and in literature, cartoons, and comic
books--showing how these interpretations have reflected the
changing cultural perspectives of successive eras. According to
Davis, six periods have shaped this cultural history, each
contributing to the evolving culture-text of A Christmas Carol that
is what we remember of all its parodies, piracies, and retellings.
Dickens's original story, written in 1843, provided proof that
urbanization had not destroyed Christmas and that the old country
traditions could flourish in the new cities. By the 1870s, A
Christmas Carol had become secular scripture, read as a retelling
of the biblical Christmas story. The sophisticated decade preceding
World War I treated the work for the first time as a story for
children. In the Depression era, while the British reaffirmed a
traditional Carol, Americans interpreted Scrooge's transformation
as the triumph of a new business ethic of service and sharing. The
Scrooge of the 1960s became a Freudian figure tormented by his
past, who conjured up Marley as a way of calling for help and who
turned on to Christmas and tuned into joys he had denied himself.
Now, when our focus in on hunger and homelessness rather than joy
in the streets, Scrooge is again a social figure placed in the
center of unsettling economic realities.
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