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Why does the world, around December 25th, use the greeting “Merry Christmas?” Well, of course the “Christmas” part comes from the holiday itself, which is officially celebrated by most of Christendom on December 25th. But the “Merry” part comes from the 1843 publication in England, and subsequent immense worldwide popularity, of A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens. Its full title was A Christmas Carol in Prose: Being a Ghost Story of Christmas. This is a wonderful book, whose characters such as Ebenezer Scrooge and Tiny Tim have entered into our culture. It is interesting that in the Bible, in 1 Samuel 7:12, the prophet Samuel sets up a stone to help the Israelites remember how God helped them against their enemies, the Philistines. He calls the stone Ebenezer, meaning Stone of Help. Charles Dickens was a Christian, who knew his Bible. Did he pick the name Ebenezer for the character whose heart had been a stone but whose stony heart was softened so that he was changed into a man who delighted in helping others? Perhaps – it is fun to speculate.
I think I have said enough about A Christmas Carol in general – you really need to read it at least once in your life. A good middle school reader, in my opinion, could handle this short book, although it was not written for children but for the general public. The book reviewed here is a special version of A Christmas Carol. It is a large paperback, published by Dover, who produce very high-quality paperback bindings that last as well as do hardbacks. On each set of pages, the righthand side reproduces the original hand-written manuscript page of the author, while the lefthand side has the printed version. The hand-written part is a copy of the original manuscript kept by the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City (open to the public). It is instructive to look at Dickens’ original text and the edits that he made before submission. And of course, reading the book itself is delightful! I think a good literature study could be made using this version of A Christmas Carol, studying the process of the author’s deliberations as he produced the final text.
A Christmas Carol is perhaps the most accessible (and shortest) path into an appreciation for the novels of Charles Dickens. I hope that a first reader will go on to read Dickens’ greatest books, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, Nicholas Nickleby, and Martin Chuzzlewit. His other books are worth reading, too, but I rank them a bit beneath these six. Dickens has been one of my favorite authors since I was 12 years old.