[LISTENED TO: December 18, 2015] A Christmas Carol
Just like two years ago when we saw A Christmas Carol, a few days later I listened to the audio book. This year, I found a different reading of it by Neil Gaiman. This one comes from the New York Public Library podcast, and is available on Soundcloud and iTunes.
What makes this reading unique (and now different from Patrick Stewart’s awesome reading and from the McCarter production (which is different from the book as well) is that the version Gaiman read was hand-edited by Dickens for his own performances. What?
Yes, evidently Dickens performed this story live a few times. As the NYPL site explians:
Charles Dickens could not only write a crackling good story, he could perform it. And so in 1853, he took his Christmas Carol show on the road, first in Britain and then in the United States. Audiences loved it. Dickens didn’t simply read from his book. He transformed it into a stageworthy script—cutting, pasting together pages of excised passages, adding stage cues for himself, rewriting, then cutting some more…. Indeed, there is only one such copy of A Christmas Carol, created by Dickens himself, and The New York Public Library has it.
Gaiman read the “as the great author intended, following edits and prompts Dickens wrote in his own hand for his unique readings 150 years ago.”
This version is condensed (as well as annotated). It is called a “prompt copy.” He cut out many descriptive passages and also added some stage directions. The entire production is 90 minutes, including a ten minute introduction by Molly Oldfield.
Gaiman introduced the story by saying he would do the actions as well as the new lines (so it’s a shame we only have audio). Hence his appearance in this photo.
Gaiman’s reading is great. He is funny, gives excellent inflection and makes the story more comical and less scary than Stewart’s version.
It’s also likely that Dickens’ stage versions would have been funnier and therefore more entertaining as well when he decided to read them to his fans (he also drank a lot before reading them–2 tablespoons of rum with cream beaten in for breakfast, a pint of champagne for tea and then a glass of sherry with an egg beaten into it before going on stage). Gaiman does not say whether he followed that procedure.
I didn’t recognize all of the changes, although one that stuck out for me was the inclusion of a new party game at Scrooge’s nephew’s house:
It was a Game called Yes and No, where Scrooge’s nephew had to think of something, and the rest must find out what; he only answering to their questions yes or no, as the case was. The fire of questioning to which he was exposed elicited from him that he was thinking of an animal, a live animal, rather a disagreeable animal, a savage animal, an animal that growled and grunted sometimes, and talked sometimes, and lived in London, and walked about the streets, and wasn’t made a show of, and wasn’t led by anybody, and didn’t live in a menagerie and was never killed in a market, and was not a horse, or an ass, or a cow, or a bull, or a tiger, or a dog, or a pig, or a cat, or a bear. At every new question put to him, this nephew burst into a fresh roar of laughter; and was so inexpressibly tickled, that he was obliged to get up off the sofa and stamp. At last the plump sister cried out: —
“I have found it out! I know what it is, Fred! I know what it is!”
“What is it?” cried Fred.
“It’s your uncle Scro-o-o-o-oge!”
Which it certainly was. Admiration was the sentiment, though some objected that the reply to “Is it a bear?” ought to have been “Yes.”
Perhaps because this version is condensed quite a bit, the darkest moments aren’t as dark. It also excludes a lot of parts (it condenses Scrooge’s breakup with his fiancée to just a few lines) and leaves out whole chunks of text. At the same token, the end is also a bit shorter. But it still works and is still very moving. It often makes me wonder why we all consider Scrooge to be a bad character when at the end of the story he is the nicest guy in the history of the world–we should all be as nice as Scrooge!
Incidentally, the entire text from this version is available for free online. It’s a fun read (but a much more fun listen).
Molly Oldfield provided the introduction to the reading. She had released a book a few years ago called Secret Museums. I gather she brought to light the fact that the NYPL had this version of the story. She also told us about how she toured museums and saw things that for one reason or another museums could not display (some too fragile, some too hard to display etc). The book sounds amazing, and yet the reviews on Amazon were very disappointing so I’ll have to see if we can find it in the library.
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