Dickensblog

'Dickens and Prince': A review

Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius by Nick Hornby (Riverhead Books, 2022).

What do a 19th-century Victorian novelist and a 20th-century rock star have in common? More than you might expect, according to award-winning author Nick Hornby, who's devoted an entire book to the unlikely pair. 

The impetus for the book came from the 2020 release of a commemorative boxed set of Prince's 1987 album Sign o' the Times. This release -- which included a whopping 63 songs that hadn't originally made the cut -- got Hornby thinking: "Who else ever produced this much? Who else ever worked that way? It was supposed to be a rhetorical question, but then I realized there was an answer: Dickens. Dickens did. Dickens worked that way."

A visit to the gallery

A new piece at Open Culture highlights the work of Michael John Goodman, creator of the Charles Dickens Illustrated Gallery, a collection of all the original illustrations from Dickens's major works.

TCM alerts

David Copperfield (1935) airs at noon Eastern today, and A Tale of Two Cities (1935) airs at 6 a.m. Eastern on Wednesday.

Keeping Christmas all the year

'Tis the season, as you know, when the world is rereading and rewatching A Christmas Carol. But the other day, inspired by a Twitter conversation about how Great Expectations is also a Christmas book (or at least part of it is), I went looking for Christmas references in other Dickens books as well. Interestingly, I found at least one reference in every single one of the novels! The majority of them were just passing references, but a few of them were significant. Besides Scrooge's Christmas ordeal, and the other Christmas books, we have ...

• The Christmas chapters in The Pickwick Papers, which include a goblin story that gives us a foretaste of the Carol
• David and Agnes getting engaged at Christmastime in David Copperfield
• Pip bringing Magwitch food, and later seeing him get arrested, on Christmas Day, in Great Expectations
• Edwin vanishing (and most likely murdered) on Christmas Eve in The Mystery of Edwin Drood

Occasionally, even a book that doesn't have a Christmas scene in it have film adaptations where Christmas scenes have been added! One well-known example is the 1935 A Tale of Two Cities, which places an important interaction between Sydney and Lucie on Christmas Eve. No doubt this was a nod to the Christmasy atmosphere that Dickens was known for. 

As Boze Herrington recently wrote of Dickens at All the (Dickensian) Year Round, "Christmas awoke something nameless and secret in him," something that makes it show up again and again in his stories as a pivotal time in people's lives. Watching for such incidences as we read him is one enjoyable way to "keep [Christmas] all the year," as Scrooge promises to do. And so, a merry Christmas to you all, not just today but always!

Maureen Dowd on Dickens and Christmas

From today's New York Times: 

Christmas morally radicalized Dickens. The disparity between the circumstances and fates of different people offended Dickens in the Christmas season. For him, it was a time to think about what we owe one another, how we live with one another; a time to have a proper sense of outrage about inequality and injustice, and to think about the past, present and future and how much they have to do with each other; a time to consider the good values we’ve thrown away and the bad values — selfishness, egotism, social snobbery, condescension and the worship of money — that infiltrate the heart.

Go here to read the whole piece.

Thoughts on 'Scrooge: A Christmas Carol' (2022)

I hate to go all bah humbug about any version of A Christmas Carol, but I'm afraid I didn't find much to enjoy about the new animated film on Netflix. It gave me the impression that someone had forced several cases of Red Bull down the throats of a bunch of animators, locked them in a room, and told them to go to town. The film is frenetic in the extreme. Fireballs streak through the air, surfaces ice over and play videos like a Christmasy Victorian MTV, people and objects float through the air, and honestly, the whole thing is exhausting.

Also, Scrooge has a dog. No, I don't get it either. She's a sweet dog, and a good foil for him, but why Scrooge would have a dog -- or why Marley, from whom he inherited her, would have had a dog -- is a question that's never addressed adequately, and so it just ends up adding to the general air of "What the heck?"

Award-winning composer Leslie Bricusse made significant contributions to the film before he passed away in October of last year. In addition to repurposing songs from his own earlier version, Scrooge (1970), he wrote new songs, in addition to writing the screenplay. His involvement makes me even sadder about my lack of enthusiasm. But most of the re-arranged songs, in this hectic atmosphere, fail to bring with them their old charm, and the new ones don't stand out at all. And there's nothing in the script -- no especially interesting new twists or backstory or flourishes -- to justify this adaptation. As far as the basic story goes, it doesn't really stray all that far from the original (aside from a few inexplicable departures, like the dog), but the sheer busyness of the film makes it look as if it didn't trust its own source material and was relying on distractions.

If there's a plus to this film at all, it's the fine vocal work of the cast, particularly Luke Evans, Olivia Colman, and the other leads. But they're so overly talkative, especially Colman as the Ghost of Christmas Past, that even that gets wearying. This was one version of the Carol that I probably won't be watching again.

Dickens on British TV

Acclaimed actress Miriam Margolyes is not a fan of Christmas, but she is famously a fan of Dickens. So she "has agreed to see if she can warm to the season through her love of Charles Dickens," in a Channel 4 special called "Miriam's Dickensian Christmas." The special airs Tuesday night, and Margolyes talks about it here. Lucinda Dickens Hawksley also worked on the special, and she discusses it here.

In other British television news, Mark Gatiss's filmed stage production of A Christmas Carol, which was recently in cinemas, will air on BBC Four (and BBC iPlayer) on Christmas Day.

New 'Christmas Carol' illustrations

New York-based artist John A. Rice is posting on Instagram some beautiful new Christmas Carol illustrations that he's been working on. Go here to see!

Benjamin Dreyer on 'the joy of reading Dickens'

In the Washington Post, Benjamin Dreyer of Random House pens a lovely and enthusiastic tribute to "A Christmas Carol" and its author. He glories in the story's "scrumptious quotableness," and he has fun imagining Dickens scrambling to get the story finished and trying to fix the time discrepancy ("Nice save, Charles"). Read the whole delightful piece here. (I've gifted the article so there's no paywall.) Thanks to Fred Butterfield for the tip!

'The Muppet Christmas Carol' turns 30

Believe it or not (I can hardly believe it myself), today is the 30th anniversary of the beloved adaptation! Entertainment Weekly has some nice features about it, including an interview with director Brian Henson and another with the Muppets themselves. Perhaps Kermit puts it best when he observes, "Redemption, gratitude, and you mix that with the Muppets' silliness and you've got yourself a good fit."