"A Christmas Carol" (Dickens)

Our next stop is the Charles Dickens Museum on Doughty Street. The famous English writer Charles Dickens realized that the Christmas tree was very popular in England. Queen Victoria, her husband, Prince Albert von Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha, and their many children had a Christmas tree every year. The newspapers were full with stories about the royal Christmas celebrations. Charles Dickens called the Christmas tree “that pretty German toy”. The best known of Dickens’s Christmas works is “A Christmas Carol”. As Florian Schweizer explains. Charles Dickens is important for Christmas because he wrote so many books about it. And the most important of the books is “A Christmas Carol”. He was very popular in the 19th century and many people thought of him as the father of Christmas. His idea of Christmas as the festival of happiness and the family really shaped the idea of Christmas in the era. Today there are countless performances of Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” around the world every Christmas. The actor Jonathan Gillard Daly shows us what happens to the story’s central character, Ebenezer Scrooge. Christmas? Humbug. The bleakest day of the year. Christmas is not but foul memories, false hopes and heaps of hypocritical humbuggery. Scrooge is visited by three ghosts. The ghost of Christmas past, the ghost of Christmas present and the ghost of Christmas yet to come. The last ghost’s visitation changes Scrooge from a man who hated Christmas, into a man who is the very spirit of Christmas itself. I shall honor Christmas in my heart. And try to keep it all the year. I will live in the past, the present and the future. The spirits of all three shall strive within me.