A Christmas Carol
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!”
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Guests
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Juliet John No other episodes
Professor of English Literature and Dean of Arts and Social Sciences at City, University of London - Jon Mee
2 episodes
Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of York - Dinah Birch
13 episodes
Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Cultural Engagement and Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool
Reading list
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Eternal Returns: A Christmas Carol's Ghosts of Repetition
Brandon Chitwood (Victorian Literature and Culture, 2015) -
The Lives and Times of Ebeneezer Scrooge
Paul Davis (Yale University Press, 1990) Google Books → -
A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Books
Charles Dickens (ed. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst) (Oxford University Press, 2006) Google Books → -
Becoming Dickens
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst (Harvard, 2011) Google Books → -
Film Form: Essays in Film Theory
Sergei Eisenstein (ed. Jay Leyda. Harcourt (Mariner Books, 1969) Google Books → -
A Christmas Carol and Its Adaptations
Fred Guida (McFarland & Company, 2000) Google Books → -
Spectacular Sympathy: Visuality and Ideology in Dickens's Christmas Carol
Audrey Jaffe (PMLA, 1994) -
Dickens and Mass Culture
Juliet John (Oxford University Press, 2010) Google Books → -
Dickens's Villains: Melodrama, Character Popular Culture
Juliet John (Oxford University Press, 2001) Google Books → -
Charles Dickens in Context
Sally Ledger and Holly Furneaux (eds) (Cambridge University Press, 2011) Google Books → -
The Annotated Christmas Carol
John Leech (ed.) (Norton, 2003) -
The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens
Robert Patten et al (Oxford University Press, 2018) -
A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings
Michael Slater (ed.) (Penguin Books, 2003) -
Dickens and the Dream of Cinema
Grahame Smith (Manchester University Press, 2014) Google Books → -
Charles Dickens: A Life
Claire Tomalin (Viking, 20011) Google Books →
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Programme ID: m0012fl5
Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0012fl5
Auto-category: 823.8 (English fiction–19th century)
Hello (First sentence from this episode)
Hello. In 1843, Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, a work which, like Dickens' reputation, has become intertwined with Christmas itself.