![Cover image for A Christmas carol [DVD]](https://secure.syndetics.com/index.aspx?type=xw12&client=charlottecofl&upc=00012569677159&oclc=&isbn=9781419818646&issn=/LC.JPG "Cover image for A Christmas carol [DVD]")
Available:*
Library | Material Type | Shelf Number | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Punta Gorda | DVD | MOVIE CHR | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Reviews (2)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 7 Up-Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol was written in 1847 and is one of the best-known Christmas stories today. Most people have seen a movie adaptation of the story but have never read the book. Here is a simple way to hear the original story, the way Dickens wrote it, with all the insights he was trying to give to the story. Ralph Cosham, the narrator, has a slight accent so the reading sounds British. While he doesn't inflect much difference between characters' voices, it is easy to understand who is speaking. The lack of dramatic variances in the narration doesn't detract from the story. The CD's have numbered sequences so stopping and starting isn't a problem. This recording could be used best in a classroom setting if small portions were listened to over a period of days or weeks since there is not enough excitement to hold listeners' attention over a longer period of time. It could be added to media center collections for students who enjoy Charles Dickens and for those who might find it difficult to read this work in its entirety.-Anita Lawson, Otsego High School, MI (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Guardian Review
A Christmas Carol has been described as the most perfect of Dickens's works and as a quintessential heart-warming story, and it is certainly the most popular. It's a ghost story with a moral, a message of hope, good cheer and Christian redemption, and an assertion of the value of the Christmas festival when families get together for feasting, and quarrels are made up. At the end of the tale, a sick child who seemed destined to die is cured, and a bad man turns over a new leaf and becomes generous and affectionate. Good triumphs over evil, good-heartedness and good cheer over poverty and misery. Yet two terrifying children who have been introduced into the story are left at the end, their fates unresolved, to haunt us. It was written in the autumn of 1843, during the hungry 40s, a prolonged period of depression and unemployment. Dickens was busy writing a novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, which was not selling well in serial form. He was also interesting himself in the condition of the country. He visited a ragged school, which offered basic education to street children - children with no parents, or neglectful ones, filthy children who sometimes missed lessons because they had been in prison, pickpockets, prostitutes - and he urged his rich friend Miss Coutts to support such schools. He spoke in support of the Mechanics' Institutes in the great industrial towns, set up to offer male and female workers libraries, lectures and some access to further education. He reacted with horror to the facts revealed in the report of the Children's Employment Commission, and planned "a very cheap pamphlet, called 'An Appeal to the People of England, on behalf of the Poor Man's Child'." The pamphlet was not written - instead he produced A Christmas Carol In it, Scrooge, a London businessman, stands for the rich, and at the start of the story he is approached and asked to make a Christmas donation for the poor suffering in the depression. He refuses rudely, on the grounds that the state provides for them: "Are there no workhouses? Are there no prisons?" And he grumbles that his poor clerk, Bob Cratchit, who has many children, expects a day off for Christmas. Scrooge is then suddenly drawn into a magical world of ghosts and spirits, described with all Dickens's exuberant imagination. John Sutherland has pointed out the many illogicalities of the narrative, but most readers travel happily and unquestioningly through time and space with Scrooge as he revisits his own past and sees the struggles of the Cratchit family and their delicate youngest boy, Tiny Tim. The Spirit of Christmas Past carries Scrooge back to his unhappy boyhood, when his neglectful parents left him at boarding school through the holidays, and at once he is softened: he pities the child he was, says, "Poor boy," weeps, and is already a changed character, ready to love his fellow men. Still, he is taken in hand by further spirits, and given a sharp political lesson by the Spirit of Christmas Present, who produces two children from under his cloak. They are a boy and girl, "meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish . . . where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked". Scrooge asks, "Are they yours?" "'They are Man's,' the Spirit answered. 'This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both . . . but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is doom.'" Scrooge is so troubled by this that he asks, "Have they no refuge or resource?" And the Spirit answers him chillingly with his own words, "Are there no prisons? . . . Are there no workhouses?" To me this is the best moment in A Christmas Carol, as Dickens sends a resounding message to the governing powers of his day (and, we may add, to our times, when one child in six leaves school unable to read fluently). The Spirit disappears and Scrooge's re-education continues. He becomes generous to the Cratchit family, and Tiny Tim, instead of dying as was predicted, recovers. Scrooge laughs and smiles, feels the joy of giving, and celebrates Christmas cheerfully thereafter. Nothing more is heard of the wolfish children. As Dickens devised his story, he "wept, and laughed, and wept again, and excited himself in the most extraordinary manner", walking about the London streets by night. He commissioned coloured illustrations and insisted on his publishers making it a beautiful book, with gilt lettering on the cover. It was greeted with rapturous approval. Lord Jeffrey wrote that Dickens had done more good by it than "all the pulpits and confessionals in Christendom". Thackeray described it in print as "a national benefit, and to every man or woman who reads it a personal kindness". This is how it has been seen ever since. Its message gives comfort and joy. But we still need to think about the wolfish children. Next week John Mullan will be looking at readers' responses. Sponsors of the Guardian's book club - Claire Tomalin Caption: Captions: To order a copy of A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings for pounds 8.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 030 333 6846 It was written in the autumn of 1843, during the hungry 40s, a prolonged period of depression and unemployment. [Dickens] was busy writing a novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, which was not selling well in serial form. He was also interesting himself in the condition of the country. He visited a ragged school, which offered basic education to street children - children with no parents, or neglectful ones, filthy children who sometimes missed lessons because they had been in prison, pickpockets, prostitutes - and he urged his rich friend Miss Coutts to support such schools. He spoke in support of the Mechanics' Institutes in the great industrial towns, set up to offer male and female workers libraries, lectures and some access to further education. He reacted with horror to the facts revealed in the report of the Children's Employment Commission, and planned "a very cheap pamphlet, called 'An Appeal to the People of England, on behalf of the Poor Man's Child'." The pamphlet was not written - instead he produced A Christmas Carol "'They are Man's,' the Spirit answered. 'This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both . . . but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is doom.'" Scrooge is so troubled by this that he asks, "Have they no refuge or resource?" And the Spirit answers him chillingly with his own words, "Are there no prisons? . . . Are there no workhouses?" To me this is the best moment in A Christmas Carol, as Dickens sends a resounding message to the governing powers of his day (and, we may add, to our times, when one child in six leaves school unable to read fluently). - Claire Tomalin
