So, this is Christmas and…no matter what you’ve done, may I wish you all the very best Compliments of the Season, Happy Holidays and a very Merry Christmas.

Ah, Christmas. This magical pagan-Christian festival which owes as much to the Victorians and Charles Dickens for the way it is celebrated as it does to good ole Jesus and a bunch of Druids. In many respects it’s fair to say, Dickens was the man who revitalized (or some might say reinvented) Christmas with his classic tale A Christmas Carol. Dickens became so associated with Christmas that when he died in 1870, there was a suggestion that if Dickens could die then so could Father Christmas. But his inspiration was not religious or even superstitious but rather his book was written as a response to the grim inequalities of Victorian England.

Originally, Dickens considered writing a political pamphlet to highlight the issue—An Appeal to the People of England, on behalf of the Poor Man’s Child—but figured such a pamphlet would have only a very limited appeal to well-meaning academics, enthusiastic charity workers, liberal politicians and rich philanthropists.

It was after he addressed a political rally in Manchester, in October 1843, where he encouraged workers and employers to join together in order to bring about social change, that Dickens decided it would be far, far better to write a story that would carry his message to the greatest number of people.

He reworked a story he had previously written in The Pickwick Papers—”The Story of the Goblins who Stole a Sexton” as the basis for A Christmas Carol. He wrote it in a furious burst of creative energy in between completing chapters for his serialized novel Martin Chuzzlewit. His story of an old miser called Ebenezer Scrooge being given a chance of redemption through the visits of three ghosts was his response to the horrific working conditions Dickens had seen in London and Manchester. During the writing of the A Christmas Carol, he would often wander out at night around the grim and impoverished London boroughs, sometimes making a loop of ten-fifteen miles in a night, witnessing firsthand the extreme poverty endured by working class families—in particular their children.

Published on December 17, 1843, A Christmas Carol sold 5,000 copies by Christmas Eve. Dickens believed this book was the greatest success he ever achieved, becoming his best-known book which has never been out-of-print since its first publication.

A Christmas Carol isn’t really a traditional ghost story of the kind later made famous by M. R. James or Algernon Blackwood. The real horror of the story is not the ghosts but rather the horrors of Ignorance and Want hiding in the cloak the Ghost of Christmas Present:

They are Man’s and they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance and this girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.

While the emotional (or rather sentimental) heart of the tale rests with Bob Cratchit and the fate of Tiny Tim. Moreover, as G. K. Chesterton pointed out though Dickens considered himself “to be a brisk man of the manufacturing age, almost a Utilitarian,” he defended the medieval feast of Christmas (food, alcohol, and dancing) “which was going out against the Utilitarianism which was coming in. He could see what was bad in medievalism. But he fought for all that was good in it.”

The story has inspired numerous movies (the one with Alastair Sim being a personal favorite), musicals (yep, I dig Leslie Bricusse score for Scrooge), comedies, and of course radio and TV versions—most recently a “woke” interpretation starring Guy Pearce as Ebenezer.

In 1971, the brilliant, nay genius animator Richard Williams made his version of A Christmas Carol starring Alastair Sim as Scrooge, Michael Hordern as Marley, Melvyn Hayes as Bob Cratchit, Joan Sims as Mrs Cratchit and Michael Redgrave as the narrator.

Williams, who died earlier this year, was one of the most innovative and original animators of the past sixty years. His work ranged from his award-winning debut animation The Little Island to the titles for What’s New Pussycat? and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum to the animation for Who Framed Roger Rabbit and his great magnum opus which was wrestled from his hands by philistine producers The Thief and the Cobbler.

A Christmas Carol was first broadcast on U.S. television by ABC on December 21, 1971, and released in cinemas the following year. The film deservedly won Williams an Academy Award for Best Short Animation. It’s magical, beautiful film, which is suitable for getting in the mood for today.
 

 
Warmest wishes to { feuilleton }.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
A Classic Ghost Story for Christmas: ‘Whistle and I’ll Come to You’
Charles Dickens & The Train of Death: The rail crash behind the classic ghost story ‘The Signal-Man’

 
Charles Dickens suffered from siderodromophobia—a fear of traveling by train—the result of his being involved in a rail crash in 1865. If you suffer from a fear of flying, then you will appreciate the dread Dickens sometimes endured—panic, foreboding, sheer white knuckle terror. His son later claimed that Dickens never quite fully recovered from the crash—and he died exactly five years to the day of the accident.

The Staplehurst train wreck took place at 3:13pm on June 9th, 1865. It happened at a viaduct on the South Eastern Railway linking London to the coastal town of Folkestone. A section of rail track had been removed. The foreman in charge of replacing the missing track misread the train timetable—believing his crew had sufficient time to finish the job before the arrival of the next train. His mistake had fatal consequences.
 

Illustration of the Staplehurst train wreck.
 
Apart from the shock and trauma, the accident had highly personal implications for Dickens. He was accompanying his mistress Ellen Ternan and her mother to Folkestone where they were to catch a boat back to France.

Long before the 50-Mile Rule—which suggests one should never an affair with someone within a 50 mile radius of home—Dickens had been careful to keep the 27-year-old Ellen well out of the public eye in France—in an effort to avoid any possibility of discovery of affair by his wife or by a prying press. The three were sitting in the first carriage when the train jumped the tracks and crashed over the side of a viaduct. Ten passengers were killed, forty were injured.
 

Photograph of the accident.
 
Once he had ensured Ellen and her mother were safe, Dickens busied himself aiding the injured and the dying. He described the accident in a letter to his old schoolfriend Thomas Mitton on June 13th, 1865:

My dear Mitton,

I should have written to you yesterday or the day before, if I had been quite up to writing. I am a little shaken, not by the beating and dragging of the carriage in which I was, but by the hard work afterwards in getting out the dying and dead, which was most horrible.

I was in the only carriage that did not go over into the stream. It was caught upon the turn by some of the ruin of the bridge, and hung suspended and balanced in an apparently impossible manner. Two ladies were my fellow passengers; an old one, and a young one. This is exactly what passed: you may judge from it the precise length of the suspense. Suddenly we were off the rail and beating the ground as the car of a half emptied balloon might. The old lady cried out “My God!” and the young one screamed.

I caught hold of them both (the old lady sat opposite, and the young one on my left) and said: “We can’t help ourselves, but we can be quiet and composed. Pray don’t cry out.” The old lady immediately answered, “Thank you. Rely upon me. Upon my soul, I will be quiet.” The young lady said in a frantic way, “Let us join hands and die friends.” We were then all tilted down together in a corner of the carriage, and stopped. I said to them thereupon: “You may be sure nothing worse can happen. Our danger must be over. Will you remain here without stirring, while I get out of the window?” They both answered quite collectedly, “Yes,” and I got out without the least notion of what had happened.

Fortunately, I got out with great caution and stood upon the step. Looking down, I saw the bridge gone and nothing below me but the line of the rail. Some people in the two other compartments were madly trying to plunge out of the window, and had no idea there was an open swampy field 15 feet down below them and nothing else! The two guards (one with his face cut) were running up and down on the downside of the bridge (which was not torn up) quite wildly. I called out to them “Look at me. Do stop an instant and look at me, and tell me whether you don’t know me.” One of them answered, “We know you very well, Mr Dickens.” “Then,” I said, “my good fellow for God’s sake give me your key, and send one of those labourers here, and I’ll empty this carriage.”

We did it quite safely, by means of a plank or two and when it was done I saw all the rest of the train except the two baggage cars down in the stream. I got into the carriage again for my brandy flask, took off my travelling hat for a basin, climbed down the brickwork, and filled my hat with water. Suddenly I came upon a staggering man covered with blood (I think he must have been flung clean out of his carriage) with such a frightful cut across the skull that I couldn’t bear to look at him. I poured some water over his face, and gave him some to drink, and gave him some brandy, and laid him down on the grass, and he said, “I am gone”, and died afterwards.

Then I stumbled over a lady lying on her back against a little pollard tree, with the blood streaming over her face (which was lead colour) in a number of distinct little streams from the head. I asked her if she could swallow a little brandy, and she just nodded, and I gave her some and left her for somebody else. The next time I passed her, she was dead.

 

Front cover of ‘London Illustrated’ showing Dickens tending to the injured.
 
The accident caused Dickens to lose his voice for two weeks. From then on he was often visibly panicked on train journeys—on one occasion hurling himself to the floor of the carriage convinced another crash was about to take place. However, he was not a man to waste his personal experience—no matter how painful—and he used the events in his ghost story The Signal-Man—one of literature’s most famous tales of the supernatural.

The Signal-Man describes an encounter between the unnamed narrator and a signalman who recounts his haunting by ghostly premonitions prior to a series of dreadful train accidents. The story formed part of Dickens’ Mugby Junction series of stories. It is a subtle and beautifully told tale, and was adapted by the BBC in 1976 for Ghost Story, starring Denholm Elliott and Bernard Lloyd. Elliott is perfect as the man haunted by a ghostly visitor, whose message he tries to understand.
 
Continues after the jump…

 
Habits often start through the comfort they give. While the tree may be up, the decorations hung and the lights a-twinkling I never feel truly festive without rereading Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. It’s a habit I started long ago, a ritual you might say, and each holiday I return to those opening lines:

Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good upon ’Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

It’s the mix of atmospheric ghost story with a deeply humanist moral that makes Dickens’ tale so irresistible. There were, of course, many other ghost stories before A Christmas Carol but none that so intrinsically linked the festive season with the supernatural.

The story of the ungrateful miser Ebenezer Scrooge finding personal redemption after a visit from three ghosts was inspired by the deleterious effects of the Industrial Revolution on the children of poor and working class families. Dickens was horrified at the conditions of the poor and originally considered writing a political pamphlet to highlight the issue—An Appeal to the People of England, on behalf of the Poor Man’s Child—but thought that such a pamphlet would have only a limited appeal to academics, charity workers, liberal politicians and philanthropists.

After addressing a political rally in Manchester in October 1843, where he encouraged workers and employers to join together to bring social change, Dickens decided that it would be far better to write a story that could carry his message to the greatest number of people. Thus he wrote A Christmas Carol. Since its publication in 1843, it has never been out of print and its humanistic themes—to learn from our mistakes, enjoy the moment and find value in human life not things—continue to inspire generation after generation.

While I enjoy reading Dickens’ tale, I can think of no greater delight than hearing it told by Vincent Price—one of the few voices that could read YouTube comments and make them sound interesting. On Christmas Day of 1949, the debonair Mr. Price hosted a holiday special where he read an edited version of A Christmas Carol....

After the jump, Vincent Price and “the oldest extant straight adaptation” for television of ‘A Christmas Carol.’
 

 
If you haven’t seen The Signalman, then you’re in for a treat; if you have, then, it will be like welcoming back a well-remembered friend.

“The Signal-Man” is a short story by Charles Dickens, first published in 1866, and relates the tale of a signal-man, who works in a solitary signalbox in a deep cutting, near the mouth of a long tunnel on a lonely stretch of railway. The signal-man is haunted by the vision of a spectral figure…well, that’s enough for here, you’ll just have to watch or read the story.

The Signalman starred Denholm Elliott, and was produced for the BBC’s Ghost Story at Christmas, which like turkey and chestnut stuffing, tinsel and crackers, was a firm festive favorite. It was the one drama that lingered long in the mind long after transmission.

Prior to The Signalman, Ghost Story at Christmas had dramatized uncanny tales by M. R. James, which had kept viewers transfixed, as we sat around our flickering TVs, in darkened living rooms, watching The Stalls of Barchester, A Warning to the Curious, Lost Hearts and The Ash Tree. It is because of this I associate Christmas with ghost stories. Without much more ado, let’s begin our tale:

“Halloa! Below there!”

When he heard a voice thus calling to him, he was standing at the door of his box, with a flag in his hand, furled round its short pole. One would have thought, considering the nature of the ground, that he could not have doubted from what quarter the voice came; but instead of looking up to where I stood on the top of the steep cutting nearly over his head, he turned himself about, and looked down the Line. There was something remarkable in his manner of doing so, though I could not have said for my life what. But I know it was remarkable enough to attract my notice….

Enjoy!
 

 
And if you can’t find time in between wrapping presents to watch the whole half-hour above, here’s a three-minute version by animator George Roberts.
 

Uncanny, eh?

Children’s television can be absolutely unbearable if you’re not actually a child. Luckily, the smart shows know this and throw you a bone every once in a while.

The BBC’s Horrible Histories recently decided to teach the kiddies about the life of Charles Dickens with a decidedly Smiths-vibe, and it’s an eerily accurate impression. Despite his reputation for being a bit humorless, I hope Moz would get a kick out of this one—I mean, it’s totally funny, and it’s for the kids!
 

 
Via Slate

 
Close the door against the chill and draw yourself a little closer to the fire. There. Comfortable? Then we’ll begin…

Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge’s name was good upon ‘Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Vincent Price hosts this short TV adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, starring Taylor Holmes as Ebeneezer Scrooge, Pat White as Bob Cratchit, and Earl Lee as the Ghost of Jacob Marley, directed by Arthur Pierson, from 1949.