A Christmas Carol

Q: What's the story?

A: You know the story.

Q: Tell it anyway.

A: Every Christmas season my parents took us to The Great American Melodrama, in Oceano, California (population 7000), to see its Holiday Extravaganza. There were hot dogs at the concession, and peanut shells on the floor, and I thought all of it was amazing. The program varied, but always included a staging of A Christmas Carol. Everything I know about the story was imprinted at these performances; until this week, I had never read Dickens’ original.

Q: What moved you to read it?

A: How many people tell a story that people are still re-telling two hundred years later? Nothing I write will survive that long, but everyone knows who Scrooge is. Anything with that staying power is worth our attention.

Q: So when you actually read what Dickens wrote, what struck you?

A: First, it’s amazing how many of Dickens’ own words made it into the Melodrama’s production. There are joke-y asides that I always assumed were inserted to make a good burlesque show, that in fact are in the original. Conversely, some absolutely central parts of the story are later modifications. That poignant moment when the Ghost of Christmas Past reveals itself to be Scrooge’s old girlfriend? Not in Dickens. (His GCP is somewhat alien and a bit of an emotional blank.) Stories do get better in the re-telling, through a process that I would guess involves forgetting and mis-remembering as much as deliberate modification; “Frankenstein” is a better name for the monster than the doctor.

Q: That was “First.” What else?

A: Few stories are as much about their “moral” as A Christmas Carol is, and I want to get to that, but my next observation is about Dickens’ style. I’ve seen experts assert that iambic meter (da-DUM da-DUM; “but SOFT what LIGHT through YON-der...”) is the “natural” meter for English; apparently various English poets in the Renaissance experimented with other meters, with not-great results. But I never really had a sense of what that means. Dicken’s writing is maybe some proof that they are right: he was not writing poetry, and so, I assume, was not trying to write in any particular meter, but he frequently falls into a sustained iambic rhythm. Here is a taste: