RAR #254: What’s So Great About A Christmas Carol?

Sarah Mackenzie (00:00): "Marley was dead, to begin with." That's one of the most famous first lines in literature. It comes from A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, which is perhaps the greatest Christmas ghost story ever told. And, today, we're going to talk about why. (00:24): I'm Sarah Mackenzie, and this is the Read-Aloud Revival podcast. Oh, and, hey, did you know this episode is also a video? It's true. Head to readaloudrevival.com/video to watch this and other episodes of the podcast. (00:41): Now, I'm willing to bet that you're familiar with the story of A Christmas Carol. It's the story, of course, of Ebenezer Scrooge, that miserly, stingy, curmudgeonly bitter man who despises Christmas, shuns human kindness and, one Christmas Eve, he's visited by the ghost of his former business partner, Jacob Marley. He's dead to begin with, and he now lives eternally in chains, and he tells Scrooge that Scrooge himself is doomed to that same fate of eternity in chains if he doesn't change his ways. So, to that end, Scrooge will be visited that very night by three spirits, and those three spirits reveal to Scrooge the impact of his coldheartedness on his own life and on the lives of others. (01:31): Now, this story has been beloved since its release in 1843. And, amazingly, it's never been out of print since its original publication. Charles Dickens wrote this book in six weeks. That's nuts. And he basically wrote the book because he needed money. He published it himself, which is something we're used to happening these days, but certainly was not the norm in the 19th century. And then it sold out of its initial print run of 6,000 copies within five days. And this was in a time when that just did not happen. (02:04): Now, today, we all know the story, and most of us look on the Disney Mickey Mouse version or The Muppets version of A Christmas Carol with a lot of fondness and nostalgia, right? And we make it part of our Christmas rituals, but why? What is it about this book? Why do so many of us love this story? (02:28): I think, the preface of the newly illustrated version of this book, my very favorite version by the way, called Little Christmas Carol, brand new, and illustrated by Joe Sutphin, I think the preface says it best. It's written by Kevin Mungons of Moody Publishers, and this is what he writes. (02:47): The best way to experience Little Christmas Carol is to read it aloud. Charles Dickens discovered this himself and started a side career where he gave public ratings of his famous tale. Something about the story grabs the public imagination and appeals directly to the children who hear it. In theory, the unlikable villain and Gothic ghosts could be frightfully scary to young readers, not to mention the death of a child part way through, but the story resonates with essential warmth, and children intuitively understand where Dickens is headed. Perhaps this is because Dickens infused his story with references to simple, childlike faith. It is good to be children sometimes and never better than at Christmas when its mighty founder was a child himself. (03:38): Sierra, an RAR Premium member, called in and left me a message telling me this about A Christmas Carol. Sierra (03:46): I don't remember why 2020 was the year that we started reading A Christmas Carol out loud as a family. Maybe we just needed a little Christmas right this very minute, but I read it to my 11-year-old, 9-year-old, 7-year-old, and 6-year-old for the first time. We turned off the lights. I read it on my Kindle. We turned on a fireplace video on the TV and had candy canes and snuggled in. And I read it with voices and everything. And I was reading one of those parts that's meant to be funny, Charles Dickens and his British humor, and my 7-year-old laughed. And I remember just like my heart skipping a beat as I'm like, "I have arrived." That's it. I am now really a successful homeschooling mom because my 7-year-old gets Charles Dickens. Sarah Mackenzie (04:34): Yes, I love that. Yes, Sierra, you have arrived. I remember a mom telling me that she was reading A Christmas Carol one year with her older kids, and her younger kids were just around, but she didn't really think they understood what was going on in the story, and then, one afternoon, two of our littles ran into the room, yelling and screaming and arguing with each other. And, when she finally got them to quiet down long enough to tell her the problem, the six-year-old told her that the four-year-old had called him a "covetous old sinner". I mean, parenting doesn't get much better than that. (05:16): I mentioned that Joe Sutphin did the illustrations for this newest version of A Christmas Carol. Joe Sutphin (05:21): I'm Joe Sutphin, and I illustrated Little Christmas Carol. Sarah Mackenzie (05:26): He's one of our favorites around here. And there is basically nothing I love more than when a favorite illustrator translates one of my favorite classics into a band of woodland characters. Yes, please, sign me up. I am all about a mouse or a rabbit in a sturdy pair of trousers. (05:47): Joe's book uses Charles Dickens' original text. It's just lightly edited for readability, and it's given fresh illustrations. Like I said, it's called Little Christmas Carol. Now, in Joe's version of A Christmas Carol, Scrooge is a rabbit, Fezziwig is an owl. The beggars at the door who ask Scrooge at the beginning to be charitable and are shunned, they're a possum and a mole. It's just so delightful. (06:15): I talked to Joe about creating the illustrations for this particular book. What was it about A Christmas Carol in particular that made him want to take it on as a project? Joe Sutphin (06:29): There was just something about the story that really resonated with me, that you have a story that is about the worst among us. And there's nothing like a lore about Scrooge. He's an awful human being. And it's a very hopeful premise that he would be given such a thorough opportunity to change. And even that his partner in life would come back almost like his one call from prison was to come and tell his friend, "Look, I'm in jail, and it's just absolutely awful, and it's forever. And don't talk over me because I only have a minute. You've just got to listen," to reach the very end, that whole concept of just the weight of it is just so real and just tell me that I may sponge away the writing on the stone, and that redemption was as immediate as that, and that it wasn't like, "Okay, it will be sponged away, but now you must go back and revisit each spirit, and they will take you through a grueling task," or whatever. (07:39): It is, literally, just the earnest, "Tell me that. I'll not be the man I was. Just tell me that it can be different," and the spirit goes away. And Christmas future doesn't exist yet. He gets to make that happen. And, in the hard things that I go through in life and the things that I cause on my own or the things I go through that I bear the weight of, I think about that a lot. I think about that redemption that I want, that Scrooge-like redemption of, "Just tell me that I can sponge away the writing on the stone. I won't be the man I was." Sarah Mackenzie (08:18): Yeah, the last of the spirits, the Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come, he was one of the first. That was one of the first illustrations that I flipped to when I got my copy of Little Christmas Carol. That's the spirit that most illustrators make pretty terrifying and even, sometimes, gruesome. But Joe didn't do that. The spirits in his version are all woodland creatures, of course, and so we have the Spirit of Christmas Past, a rabbit with a stream of light coming from her head, because, oh, gosh, light is all throughout A Christmas Carol. Dickens really uses imagery like light and darkness and bells to tell his story. So the Spirit of Christmas Past has a rabbit with a light coming out of its head. The Spirit of Christmas Present is a lion. But the Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come, that was the one I wondered how Joe would handle. Joe Sutphin (09:13): I tried different things. I tried even some wolf-like things. But everything I did felt really terrifying. And, if you read it, that spirit can't do any harm to Scrooge. It is literally there to say, "This is the future that you have created. I'm just pointing at it and I'm just showing you. And you don't have a choice to look away. You just have to look at this." It never touches or harms him. As you're driving, you pass by some vultures, some turkey buzzards. They're eating something dead, and they are at that thing's end. But they did not cause it. They don't hunt anything down. They don't kill it. They're just there stoically at the end of that thing's life. And I thought, "This seems like the sort of thing that could be that stoic presence and have no voice and present itself in a way that is disconcerting, but not terrifying that you don't feel like it's going to harm you. That was where my concept for that came from. Sarah Mackenzie (10:24): There are so many characters in this book, and Joe was thoughtful about all of them. I asked him if he had a favorite character to illustrate. You're going to love what he says. Joe Sutphin (10:35): The boy at the very end who he shouts down to and asks him what day it is, I decided early on that little boy's family would play a big role, SO you see his mom and little baby siblings in that iris shot at the beginning of stave one, and you see her again, yeah, when Scrooge is looking out the window on page 40. You see her again with little babies. And then, when we get to the stave three opener iris shot, we see that little boy again with all the other little street children digging through the garbage cans. And then we see him again when we get to the stave five opener. And, now, I've added a little brother, and they're looking in the shop window. (11:35): And then we see him and his brother again as he's yelling out the window, which I like because we're revisiting the same scene where Scrooge earlier is looking out the window and he's seeing the ghost with the monstrous iron safe attached to his leg, and he is crying piteously because he cannot help the person. And that person would be this boy's mom, so that guy is wishing that he still had the physical ability to help somebody. So, now, Scrooge is looking out that same window at these children that, in my world, belong to that homeless mom. And he has an opportunity to bless them with more money than is probably necessary for going and fetching a Turkey, so I really enjoyed adding the little backstories and the little things that I knew were there. Sarah Mackenzie (12:30): The story of how Scrooge goes from the horrible person he is at the beginning to a man redeemed is a kind of story that speaks to the soul. And, I am telling you, the illustrations in this version, they just bring it to life in a whole new way. Even Joe himself said he had a hard time choosing which scenes to illustrate because he just kept wanting to illustrate them all. Joe Sutphin (12:53): I kept reaching points where I thought, "I want to show that. I want to show that." There was just so much I wanted to show. Sarah Mackenzie (13:01): I love that we have this new version of A Christmas Carol to share with our kids because it really is one of the stories families want to read again and again and again. And I love that, when my kids are adults and they think of Scrooge, they're going to think of Joe Sutphin's Scrooge. I'm pretty sure of it. (13:19): Now, the language is a large part of what makes A Christmas Carol such a delicious read-aloud. Here's what grace from Ohio told me. Grace (13:30): A Christmas Carol really made me fall in love with Charles Dickens, his turn of phrase and also just the simplistic lessons that are so beautiful and so profound of how small moments with your family, mundane choices that don't seem so huge in the moment, or seem to be small things, grow into the person that you become and also the person that your family and friends experience long-term, and how bitterness can take root and turn you into something that would be unrecognizable to your younger self, and how also moments of loving others can grow and change the world and the course of the future in ways that you might not know. Sarah Mackenzie (14:08): Another RAR Premium member, Anne, called in and left me a message telling me this story. Anne (14:14): My favorite homeschool memory is that, with my youngest child, I realized how much fun it could be to read next to my son while he was falling asleep. So he was in his crib. He hadn't any idea what the story was about. And I love the beautiful language that was way over his head. So, several years in a row, that was our tradition, to read the Christmas Carol together. And I always hoped, since he would have heard the story so many times, he would grow into it, and it would be really easy for him to understand it at a young age, so that's my favorite memory of the book. Sarah Mackenzie (14:53): Every year, at Christmastime, I watch The Man Who Invented Christmas. That's a film. It came out a handful of years ago. I love it. It's the story of Charles Dickens writing A Christmas Carol. A Scrooge is played by Dan Stevens. Hello, Downton Abbey fans. I see you. I love this movie. Some of my kids like it. Some don't. It's kind of sad. It's a little slow, but it's also hopeful and beautiful. Anyway, it's one of my all-time favorite movies, and I will link to the common-sense Review of that movie in the show notes so you can decide if it's a good fit for your own family. (15:31): But, last year, I had another really delightful experience of the story of Charles Dickens writing A Christmas Carol. I read a historical fiction novel called Mr. Dickens and His Carol written by Samantha Silva. Now, Mr. Dickens and His Carol is a fictional account of Charles Dickens writing A Christmas Carol. I really enjoyed it on audio. It's an adult novel, by the way, so I just enjoyed this one on my own. But the audiobook is very moody and British. It's narrated by Euan Morton, and it's produced by Macmillan Audio. It might be just the ticket if you're looking for a little festive read while you wrap presents or do some chores around the house. Euan Morton (Audiobook Narrator) (16:13): On that unseasonably warm November day at One Devonshire Terrace, Christmas was not in his head at all. His cravat was loose, top button of his waistcoat undone, study windows flung open as far as they'd go. Chestnut curls bobbed over his dark slate eyes that brightened to each word he wrote, "This one. No. That one," scribble and scratch, a raised brow, a tucked chin, a guffaw. Every expression was at the- Sarah Mackenzie (16:44): I enjoyed the book, of course, so I wrote the author to ask if she wanted to come talk to me about it. Samantha Silva (16:50): I'm Samantha Silva, author of Mr. Dickens and His Carol. Sarah Mackenzie (16:54): She came to Read-Aloud Revival to tell me about the backstory of Charles Dickens and his impetus for writing A Christmas Carol in the first place. I'll set the stage. It's 1843. Charles and his wife Catherine have a bunch of kids, lots of financial obligations. Charles, while he had been successful as an author, he had just published a book called Martin Chuzzlewit, which is generally considered even still his least successful book. Samantha Silva (17:24): Martin Chuzzlewit was a flop, really his first flop. And he was in debt to his publishers, Chapman and Hall, and so they came to him and said, "We're going to have to start deducting from your pay so you can pay us back." And so he, Charles Dickens, thought to himself, "I need a money spinner, and so I think I'll write a Christmas book." And it was the only book he sat down and wrote it in six weeks, which is extraordinary. And it was published the week before Christmas, sold out. There was a second printing before the New Year. It was just this unbelievable success. Sarah Mackenzie (17:58): So how many creative liberties did Samantha Silva take in writing Mr. Dickens and His Carol? That's what I asked her, because it's not a biography, it's a novel, which is fiction. Samantha Silva (18:09): I took tons of creative liberties wherever I wanted to. And I'm not the first person, obviously, to do it. Lots of people have written about Charles Dickens. But I wasn't trying to be a biographer. I wasn't trying to be. I was trying to be true to who he was as a human being, but not necessarily be true to what actually happened in his life, because it's not that good of a story. He needs money to pay off his publishers, and he has an idea for a money spinner, and it works. Ultimately, it works. So the question for me about Charles Dickens was how does a man and a writer who's this flawed, this complicated, but who also has a heart as big as the world come up with this idea and the inspiration for Christmas Carol? And so everything, the whole story, really derives from that. (19:05): What I thought was interesting was the idea that Chapman and Hall come to him and try to blackmail him into writing a Christmas book. And, of course Dickens, would say, "No. No one tells me what to write and what to do," and refuses to do it. And that's what catapults him into his own Scrooge-like journey that, ultimately, becomes the inspiration to write The Christmas Book when he knows he has no choice. So that was where my conception of the book was born, really out of that conflict, both as a screenwriter, I think, and a novelist. You always look for conflict and the obstacles and an inciting incident. And if your publishers come to you and try to blackmail you into writing a particular book you don't want to write, that's an excellent conflict, so I ran with that. Sarah Mackenzie (19:52): Mr. Dickens and His Carol, like I said, is an historical fiction novel that's a ghost story of its own. Charles and his wife Catherine are having marital troubles. And there's a bit of a creepy plot twist. It is a ghost story, so heads up if that's not your kind of read, not the kind of cozy Christmas read that you're looking for. But, for some of you, I think it'll be just the ticket and you'll enjoy it as much as I did. Here's the thing I want you to know about Charles Dickens. Because he wasn't just an ordinary writer in the mid-19th century, he changed the reading world forever. Samantha Silva (20:28): People actually became readers. They were illiterate when Dickens started writing. By the end of the Victorian period, just hundreds of thousands of people could read, and, to a large extent, it was because they wanted to read Dickens. So, in the beginning, they would gather when a new... Because he wrote serially, and so a new number would come every month, and the illiterates would gather in gin shops, and somebody who could read would read the number to the rest of them. And then, slowly, they became readers themselves, learned how to read, taught others to read, and so literacy just takes off in this period. It grows exponentially because people want to read Dickens because he was the first writer who wrote about them. Sarah Mackenzie (21:14): It's so good, right? His heart for the poor and forgotten is certainly a throughline in all of Dickens' books. And we see it clearly here in A Christmas Carol, a story about a stingy, selfish man who, by way of Christmas, becomes a generous soul. A Christmas Carol Narrator (21:33): Marley was dead, to begin with. There's no doubt whatever about that. He was as dead as a doornail, though I confess that I can't tell you from my own knowledge what there is that's particularly dead about a doornail. I'd have been inclined myself to regard a coffin nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade, but I'll not disturb the wisdom of our ancestors. Sarah Mackenzie (22:06): Some Read-Aloud Revival kids called in to tell me what they think of A Christmas Carol. Listen in to what Eleanor says. Eleanor (22:13): A Christmas Carol is one of our favorite stories that my dad reads to us almost every year at Christmas. And we like watching The Muppet Christmas Carol, the version... the movie. Michael Caine plays in it. He does a really good job of playing Scrooge, and Rizzo the Rat and Gonzo are in it, so, yeah, that's our favorite thing to do at Christmas. Helena (22:33): Hi. My name is Helena. And, last year, we listened to A Christmas Carol. It was so good that I listened to it a lot in my room. It was really good. And I'm glad because the bad guy in the story turns into the good guy in the end, and I'm really happy about it. Sarah Mackenzie (22:54): I hope you read A Christmas Carol this year. It's a story that shapes childhood in a rich and meaningful way. We love this book so much. We've made it the foundation for our 2024 Christmas School. Most of us have too much on our plates before the busy season even begins for the holidays, right? And then, December hits, and we feel blind on kind of everything, but, for homeschooling families, December can be the best month of the entire school year. And that's what Christmas School is for. Christmas School is a whole family program from Read-Aloud Revival that helps your family slow down, savor the season and wait in joyful Hope. You can join thousands of families and replace your current curriculum with a month of Christmas School to make December a different kind of learning in your homeschool year, a better one. (23:46): In 2024, we're reading, surprise, Little Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, illustrated by Joe Sutphin. All the details are at readaloudrevival.com/christmasschool. Or you can text the word "Christmas" to the number 33777 to find out more. Dickens says it himself. "It is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child himself." A Christmas Carol Narrator (24:16): I have life, my own life, a life to make amends in. The Spirits of the Past and of the Present and of the Future shall live within me. Jacob Marley, I thank you and, to heaven and Christmastime, all praise. Sarah Mackenzie (24:35): Thank you for listening or watching today. You'll find our favorite versions of A Christmas Carol, including, of course, Little Christmas Carol in the show notes at readaloudrevival.com/254. (24:57): Special thanks to our guests on today's show, Joe Sutphin, Samantha Silva, and the RAR Premium members who called in and left me messages for this episode. This episode was produced by Yellow House Media. The audiobook sample from Mr. Dickens and His Carol is a production of Macmillan Audio. The samples from A Christmas Carol itself is from an audio drama available on Audible, modified by R.D. Carstairs and narrated by Sir Derek Jacobi, Kenneth Cranham and the entire cast. (25:29): Links to everything are in the show notes. I'll see you next time. In the meantime, go make meaningful and lasting connections with your kids through books.