The ‘little Christmas tale’ that has everything

Susan Hill reappraises Charles Dickens’s classic

You may be sure you have done more good by this little publication, fostered more kind feelings and prompted more positive acts of beneficence than can be traced to all the pulpits and confessionals in Christendom.

So wrote the Edinburgh critic, Lord Jeffrey — not an easy man to please — to Charles Dickens. Thackeray said: ‘It seems to me a national benefit and to every man who reads it a personal kindness.’

And as A Christmas Carol was first received so it has continued: 6,000 copies were snapped up on its first day of publication and it still appears in some new edition almost every year. The total number sold round the world since 1843 must run into billions. Dickens knew he had a hit on his hands in more forms than the original. By early February 1844 no fewer than eight different dramatisations had been made, but even he, used to public acclaim and applause as he was, might have been surprised at all the manifestations of his ‘little Christmas tale’ that have appeared since. The book has been staged, filmed and televised, it has been mimed, marionetted, turned into ballets and even an opera (by Thea Musgrave). It has been adapted, paraphrased, edited, re-written, abridged, modernised and performed by children in one version or another in schools up and down the land. Few writers have the accolade of a character they invented becoming a universal word, as ‘a Scrooge’ rapidly was for ‘a miser’. There is Shakespeare and ‘a Shylock’ and J. M. Barrie with ‘a Peter Pan complex’ but after that?

The Carol succeeds on so many counts. It is one of the best ever ghost stories because it is genuinely frightening and because it fulfils that essential requirement — that the ghost should have a purpose.