[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.” (more…)
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