The nine surviving and enthusiastic Dickens Champions members of Manchester’s Dickens’ reading group met recently to discuss A Christmas Carol and to generally bring the year to a celebratory conclusion.
Everyone brought drinks and nibbles. Donna excelled herself and brought mulled cider and a Dickens cake, made from a recipe by Adele Geras featured in last months’ Newbooks magazine, which was delicious. Steven wore his “Bah Humbug!” hat. (see photo).
Maeve contributed this short piece following our discussion:
A Christmas Carol is a story that has a timeless appeal and it shows what a good writer Dickens was. Some of his books are very long and padded outbecause of the format in which they were published, but this story manages in under 100 pages to give us a complete picture of the life of Scrooge. It has something for everyone – ghosts, social comment, villains and heroes and a wonderful ending that, although sentimental, is perfect for the time of year. This work has been adapted more times than any other and has ended up on TV, film, radio and as an opera.
Some of us had managed to see a performance of A Christmas Carol this week as well at a local theatre. The script by John Mortimer was incredibly close to the original and left very little out. We compared notes about film versions we had seen which led us on to discussing other Dickensian film adaptations as well.
We then revisited our initial aspirations for our year of Dickens’ reading and found that most of them had been met. We survivors, are ending the year knowing a lot more about Dickens than we did at the start, we understand much more about his reputation as one of Britain’s greatest writers and our enthusiasm for reading more has not wavered.
To that end, half a dozen of the group intend to carry on meeting next year, assuming a mutually agreeable time and place can be secured. That’s a great outcome for this project and I hope Mr Dickens would have been proud.
Get involved
Read our Dickens Champions thoughts on a year of reading Dickens part 1 and part 2.
Catch up on all our Dickens Champions’ blog posts as they read and reviewed their way through Dickens in 2012.
We’d like to say a big thank you to all the reading groups who have been our Dickens Champions this year – for all your reading, enthusiasm, inspiration and endurance!
