#but hey they're volunteer run and donate all their money to various charities

[billpottsismygf]

So, I own three copies of A Christmas Carol. A couple of weeks ago I only had two - my pretty hardback one and the one in the Wordsworth collection of Dickens' Christmas books - but then I was in my local second-hand bookshop and I spotted the Penguin edition of collected Christmas writings by Dickens, which I had perused online already. I took a picture of the contents page, went home, cross checked whether there was anything in it that I didn't already have in other editions, found that there were a couple of tiny pieces that I didn't, then I went back the next day and bought it.

I felt a little silly for this, but now it's the edition I'm using to read along with A Dickens December (it was the copy closest to hand) and I'm really pleased I bought it because it's got lots of notes along with the text.

Some of my favourites so far include the fact that Dickens' original draft went on for several sentences about how much of a stupid 'poser' Hamlet is; that the bit about driving a coach in the stairwell was referencing a speech by a particular politician; and that Marley not having bowels is a pun on literal bowels, the belief that emotions were located in the bowels, and the 'biblically derived' bowels meaning of mercy or tenderness.