DICKENS GAVE CHRISTMAS GIFT TO THE WORLD

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26963, 24 December 1948, Page 5

DICKENS GAVE CHRISTMAS GIFT TO THE WORLD

At the end of 1843, virtually all of London was asking, “Have you read it? ” Invariably the smiling reply was, “ Yes, God bless him, I have! ’ The excited city was talking about A Christmas Carol,” and everyone was blessing its author, Charles Dickens. Ever since its first triumphant appearance, people everywhere have never stopped talking about ‘ A Christmas Carol nor will they ever tire of telling and retelling the beloved story of old Ebeneezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim and the benevolent Ghosts. For A Christmas Carol” is no longer merely a story: it is a time-honoured tradition Yet the simple little tale did not roll easily off Dickens’s fluent pen. He knew what he wanted to say, but how difficult it was to make the perfect choice of words. And so Dickens paced back and forth in his room, laughed and wept with the excitement of literary creation, and wandered out for 20-mile walks into the lonely London night, seeking solitude and inspiration. At last, in November, 1843, after two months of strenuous effort, Charles Dickens completed “A Christmas Carol.” • The resulting manuscript, which he had so painfully and so lovingly worked over—writing, erasing, rewriting and writing again—was to become a classic which would be foreever mingled with the goodness of Christmas. , In the preface of his new story, the wise and kindly Dickens made a wish. “I have endeavoured,” he wrote, “m this Ghostly little book to raise the Ghost of an Idea; which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly . - - . ” A . The whole world has granted this wish—not once but many times over. The wonderful fable rapidly became an international favourite, appearing in practically every language on earth—and earning fame in each. “A Christmas Carol” was Charles Dickens’s everlasting Christmas gift to all the world.