From the very first line, Marley was dead to begin with. What he's doing is playing philosophical games with big questions of time and knowledge. And these run through the entire text. I mean, that's probably why it's on the GCSE curriculum at the moment. To do all that in such a concentrated space is quite remarkable. But you also have poetic patterns throughout, a sort of warm and cold, light and darkness. You have magic realist techniques. You have what we now call special effects. And that's all there in the writing."
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Charles Dickens' novella, written in 1843 when he was 31, which has become intertwined with his reputation and with Christmas itself. Ebenezer Scrooge is the miserly everyman figure whose joyless obsession with money severs him from society and his own emotions, and he is only saved after recalling his lonely past, seeing what he is missing now and being warned of his future, all under the guidance of the ghosts of Christmases Past, Present and Yet To Come. Redeemed, Scrooge comes to care in particular about one of the many minor characters in the story who make a great impact, namely Tiny Tim, the disabled child of the poor and warm-hearted Cratchit family, with his cry, "God bless us, every one!"
With
Juliet John
Professor of English Literature and Dean of Arts and Social Sciences at City, University of London
Jon Mee
Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of York
And
Dinah Birch
Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Cultural Engagement and Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool
Producer: Simon Tillotson