Authors Electric

Being an autodidact, I was not aware until a few weeks ago that Charles Dickens had written five Christmas novellas in the 1840s, not just " A Christmas Carol " - all, he averred, with "a strong moral message."  Most UK schoolchildren probably know the other four as " The Chimes ," " The Cricket on the Hearth, " " The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain " and " The Battle of Life ." Each of them delivers, as Dickens put it, "a strong moral message" and all but the last come with supernatural twist. I came across this jolly factoid cluster while researching an idea for a sequel to my own Christmas novella: " Milagro on 34th Avenue ." That 2015 novella, about which I've written here previously , gives homage to my favourite Christmas movie - Miracle on 34th Street (particularly the 1947 original with Edmund Gwenn, Maureen O'Hara and little Natalie Wood, directed by playwright George Seaton). I ...

Happy New Year all! Right, I’ll kick off 2019 with an admission: until two weeks ago, I had never read A Christmas Carol . Yup, you read that right. Charles Dickens’s much-loved (and pleasingly short) fable about mean old Scrooge being ‘woke’ (right up there with modern idioms, that’s me) and swapping his miserliness for kindness and generosity… to be honest, I knew the story so well I really thought I had read it. But in preparation for a family visit to David Edgar’s adaptation of the book for the Royal Shakespeare Company , I thought I’d take up the original – and boy, am I glad I did. Because if I hadn’t, I might really have thought that what we saw in Stratford was the Real McScrooge. Or rather, I’d have suspected some of the odder scenes as being fashionably updated, but not known exactly where Dickens ended and his adaptor began. The more skilled the adaptor – and Edgar is very skilled – the more the original writer’s essence is blurred, twisted and, frankly...