#A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

[canon-in-too-deep]

Free Christmas Carol Typeset

So I finished up and posted the last chapter of my fic yesterday, and thought I'd get back to doing some typesetting. Thus, here is A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, with the original 1843 illustrations by John Leech. Not imposed, sized for half letter (letter folio). Kept the title page relatively simple. I wanted to do something similar to the original 1843 title page.

Free typeset can be found here:

If you use any of my typesets, feel free to tag me! I love seeing what people make. And if any of these were helpful to you, please consider dropping a like/reblog if you can! You can also follow this blog for any future free typesets. (If there's any typesets you'd like to see for other public domain works, let me know! I'm always looking for suggestions. )

[goblog20-blog]

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

"A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens is a timeless masterpiece that has become synonymous with the spirit of Christmas. Published in 1843, this novella tells the transformative tale of Ebenezer Scrooge, a miserly old man who is visited by the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come.

Dickens weaves a poignant narrative that combines social commentary with a powerful message of redemption and compassion. Through vivid characters and evocative descriptions, the author takes readers on a journey through Scrooge's life, exploring the consequences of greed and the potential for personal and societal change.

The enduring appeal of "A Christmas Carol" lies not only in its exploration of the holiday themes but also in its profound insights into the human condition. The story's impact is heightened by Dickens' skillful use of language, creating a vivid portrayal of Victorian London and the characters who inhabit it.

This classic has proven to be more than just a Christmas story; it is a timeless exploration of the importance of kindness, generosity, and the capacity for individuals to change for the better. "A Christmas Carol" remains a beloved and relevant work that continues to resonate with readers of all ages, reminding us of the true meaning of the holiday season.

Read now or download (free!)

Read online (web)

EPUB3 (E-readers incl. Send-to-Kindle)

EPUB (older E-readers)

EPUB (no images, older E-readers)

Kindle

older Kindles

[puppetdaily]

The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come from A Christmas Carol at Chichester Festival Theatre

[wordsbyparker]

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (unabridged narration)

Last year I did an unabridged narration of "A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens. While it's not my best work, I had fun with it and it was nice to read the original story. 😁 If you decide to listen, I hope you enjoy it! 🎄

[sp00ky-p00ky]

🎅🎄🎁☃️

@neil-gaiman this is amazing!! Merry Christmas!

[peacefulandcozy]

Instagram credit: coffeesoakedpages

[brandyschillace]

So this chap turned up with a flashy screwdriver and a blue telephone booth thing—and next thing I know, I’m meeting Charles Dickens right before his famed NYC reading of A Christmas Carol…

Thanks for a great night Neil Gaiman and Molly Oldfield!

[homoqueerjewhobbit]

A lot of Christians read A Christmas Carol and gloss right over the "pay workers a living wage" message and take away "not being merry on Christmas is a cardinal sin" instead.

[flowerytale]

Charles Dickens, from A Christmas Carol

[browsethestacks]

A Christmas Carol

Art by Justin McElroy

[beggars-opera]

Hey, so we don't talk enough about A Christmas Carol as being at least a little bit about not continuing a cycle of abuse and neglect, both against others and yourself.

In the book little Scrooge is left languishing over the holidays in a boarding school for some never-explained reason, but it is made very clear that this is miserable and unfair, and that his father is doing this on purpose. His sister specifically comes to tell him that "father is so much kinder now than he used to be, that home's like heaven." This also reflects a bit of Dickens's own childhood when his father went into debtor's prison and little Charlie was forced to support his family working full time in a shoe-blacking factory at the age of 12 (which is also why so many of his books seem to have a moral of "hey, kids are people too and maybe we shouldn't make them work in the mines.")

Whatever family reunion happened after didn't work out, because Scrooge continues believing that no one is coming to save him and pulling himself up by his bootstraps at the detriment of all other social relationships is the only way forward. And the more he lives by that philosophy, the more miserable he gets, because obviously he pushes away anyone who has that hope that he lost. They threaten to break down the walls he's built and teach him that a big pile of money doesn't have to be the only thing that he can rely on, if he'd just let himself be vulnerable and have a relationship with people who care about him, because they're out there even if he's ignoring them.

There is a certain type of person still very much out there who thinks this way. "I've never been happy in my life, so no one else has a right to be either. I was abused in my childhood so it's only fair that everyone else suffer as well." We see this in parents who still try to use corporal punishment, and in wealthy people who ignore the social factors keeping others down and scream that everyone else is just entitled, that only those who suffer and scrape deserve happiness. And they especially hate the people like Fred who represent the past that could have been, who have maintained hope for the future, and seem to be rubbing their optimism in your face, when in reality they're just maintaining hope because it's the only way you can survive.

It's so important for Scrooge to actually see the impact this thinking has on both himself and multiple generations. Rich people have this weird hangup about this story because they think Scrooge is bad because he's rich. He's not, he's bad because he's a horrible person and a miser - he doesn't use his money to better anything, including himself. Salting the earth, everyone suffers here, including him. And he learns that he's going to die old and alone without ever having spent or enjoyed his money, and that his family feels sorry for him, and that the nameless masses of poor people out there that he decries so much are in fact living, breathing people, including tiny disabled kids who don't deserve to suffer just because you decided life isn't fair.

In the end he takes responsibility for actually uplifting the people in the next generation who are trying to make the world a better place and no longer punching down, because it doesn't have to be this way. So many people out there just give up hope because things are hard and they think trying to improve things is a pointless exercise that makes them look dumb. How dare you grow a year older and not an hour richer! How dare you marry for love! That's the only thing more ridiculous than a Merry Christmas! When in reality, there are plenty of people who would love to see them happy if they just had a chance.

It's really sad that, while the language used to describe it has changed, these problems still persist. That people feel so wronged and isolated that they spend their days ensuring everyone else will be as well. That they fail to see their fellow humans as fellow humans who are just as deserving of love and kindness and a roof over their heads. I don't care what time of year it is, we should all be lifting each other up rather than tearing each other down.

[notaplaceofhonour]

reverse A Christmas Carol where Charles Dickens is visited by eight spirits during Hanukkah to terrorize him into being normal about Jews

[heatherfield]

“Why do you doubt your senses?” “Because,” said Scrooge, “a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!” —A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

The Muppet Christmas Carol + How to Be a Ghost [x]

[warrioreowynofrohan]

A few different people have been observing that Scrooge begins to change more quickly in the book than is often shown in adaptations. The Spirit of Christmas Yet To Come isn’t the one crucial factor breaking his obstinacy, but rather a final message to drive home a point that Scrooge had already become receptive to. I want to trace the shape of Scrooge’s progress over the course of the book and see what it reveals. (There will be some ‘spoilers’ here, since the story seems fairly universally known even among those who are reading the book for the first time.)

After Marley’s appearance, he is disturbed and discomfited, but still trying to hang onto denial and not face what he’s been told.

With Chistmas Past, adaptations often treat it like a psych session - see, you hate Christmas because you were so miserable during it. But in the book, that isn’t the point at all. Scrooge sees times when he was unhappy as a boy, but he also sees what comforted him during those times - reading and imagination, which his adult self would dismiss asfrivolous and unprofitable - and recaptures his joy in those things. He sees times when he was happy, like at Fezziwig’s Christmas party. And he sees how he’s become the kind of person who made his younger self unhappy rather than happy, and how easy it would to be otherwise.

He sees himself asan unhappy child, and wishes that he’d been kinder to the young boy singing carols at the door. He sees himself happily employed with a kind, generous and personable employer, who could create a vastly more pleasant workplace climate at trivial expense, and wishes he’d been nicer to Bob Cratchit.

And then he sees Belle, and is shown that his unhappiness is of his own making and the consequence of hus own choices. His being the selfish, avaricious person he is is not the consequence of Belle breaking up with him; it is the cause of it. She saw him already becoming that person, and chose not to follow him in that path. Her choices left her a happy, loving and loved woman; his left him unhappy and alone. Scrooge cannot bear this, and rejects and fights the spirit rather than face it.

But he has nonetheless already begun to change. Whereas he initially did not want to go with Christmas Past (“a night of unbroken sleep would be more conducive to [my welfare]”), he willingly goes with Christmas Present and expresses the desire to learn and benefit. He sees people in all manner of circumstances, good and bad, choosing to take joy in each other’s company and the comforts, small or great, around them. Many adaptations fail in this, focusing Scrooge’s attention on the idea that people dislike him (Mrs Cratchit; his nephew’s joke) but in the book Scrooge clearly greatly enjoys his nephew’s party, the nephew is being good-humoured and generous and expresses his goodwill towards Scrooge, and Scrooge doesn’t mind the joke at all. He sees the Cratchits making the best of what they have, and how he is making their lives harder than need be. He sees, in many ways and places, how he could be making others happy and being happy himself, rather than making evrryobe miserable, and it is an appealing picture. And Present calls him out, several times, on his past words and sentiments, and Scrooge repents them.

By the time he meets the Spirit of Christmas Yet To Come, he is already willing and prepared to change, and making deliberate plans to do so. The thing that I think is emphasized through the scenes with Yet To Come, as a driving home of the point, is that Scrooge’s actions up to this point have not only made him and others unhappy - they are an utter failure at getting Scrooge the one thing he had prioritized: wordly security, respect, and dignity. In Belle’s words, his turn to avarice in his youth was in hopes of avoiding the “sordid reproach” that the world has for poverty. He was fine, and even pleased, with being feared rather than loved - what he did not want was to be patronized, despized, looked down on.

And now he sees where that got him! His business partners don’t even care to attend his funeral. Men whose respect he hoped to have gained don’t even give him a second thought, and for the brief moment they do, think ill of him (“Old Scratch” is Victorian slang for the devil). His chambers and even his body are plundered (tomorrow’s reading is even more graphic about this, in some lines, than most adaptations). He’s buried in an obscure, untended, weedy churchyard, because no one cares enough about him to make other arrangements. He has none of the worldly respect, regard, dignity for which he turned to money as a protector. Past and Present showed that he was wanting the wrong things; but Future shows him that he wasn’t even achieving the things he thought he did want, amd was in fact achieving their opposite.

The point of Future, then, is not to convince Scrooge to change. He has already chosen that he desires to change. Future alone, without the earlier spirits, would be supremely ineffective; showing Scrooge that his servant and the people around him hate him, without first showing him that he can be happy and make other people happy, would only make him more of a misanthrope. This is not a “scare ‘em straight,” as some adaptations play it. The point of Future is as a final guard against backsliding, against regret: you are losing nothing by changing, because your current path is losing you even the paltry things you sought to gain by it.

Also, I hadn’t really registered this on previous reads, but this is the very near future - the Christmas one year after the period of the book. This is never stated outright, but Christmas Present says of Tiny Tim, “If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, none other of my race will find him here” - meaning, no future Christmas. And, in the visions with Christmas Future, Tiny Tim has died only a few days ago. In the words of Dante (paraphrased) “the time was perilously short for turning.” The Spirit of Christmas Yet To Come doesn’t teach the lesson - that’s the previous spirits - but he makes sure it sticks.

[nine-frames]

"The message, if we hear it, is make it last all year."

The Muppet Christmas Carol, 1992.

Dir. Brian Henson | Writ. Jerry Juhl | DOP John Fenner

[fictionadventurer]

Maybe one of the reasons that the A Muppet Christmas Carol works so well as an adaptation is that the Muppets are particularly well-suited for capturing Dickens' comedy. A movie can't capture all the wordplay and wry satire of the book's prose, but a Muppet adaptation comes closer than maybe any other version could, because the Muppets love wordplay and satire, so even if the humor isn't quite what Dickens would do, it's not against the spirit of the book. Muppets are broad, clearly-defined character types--much like what Dickens is known for--so casting Muppets as Dickens characters is a surprisingly natural fit. And the Muppets also have an earnestness that lets them portray the sweeter side of the story. It's a very deft match between the two properties--they're just slightly different flavors of the same storytelling spirit.

(And, honestly, I can't imagine any actor capturing the warmth and jolliness of The Ghost of Christmas Present better than "giant custom-made Muppet-suit" could.)