Hearn - best known as an authority on children’s literature and on “ The Wizard of Oz” in particular - provides a substantial introduction in which he tracks Dickens’s early career up through his 1842 visit to America and the composition of “A Christmas Carol” that followed in 1843. Michael Patrick Hearn’s excellent annotated edition, which first appeared in 1976, has been reissued this year (though without any updating since its last appearance in 2004 the bibliography is noticeably out of date). Yet will they ever open the book? All too commonly, “A Christmas Carol,” like “ Don Quixote” and “ Robinson Crusoe,” is a classic people think they know without actually ever having read a word of it. Over the next few days, many families will again watch Alistair Sim or the Muppets in one of the innumerable film adaptations. One critic described Charles Dickens’s famous book as “saturated with exaggerated Christmas fervour” and “larded with soggy and indigestible lumps of sickly sentiment.” That’s probably a little too strong, too dismissive for this artistically complex tale about a skinflint’s change of heart. “Bah, humbug!” says Ebenezer Scrooge about Christmas - but some readers would use the same phrase to dismiss “A Christmas Carol” itself.
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