Audiobook · read by volunteers
À Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
Read by Mark Bradford, Kara Shallenberg (1969-2023), Kristen McQuillin, Hugh McGuire, Bill Stackpole · 5 chapters · 3 h 14
About the book
Ebenezer Scrooge is rich, solitary and proud of it. He hates Christmas, ignores the poor and turns away anyone who asks him for kindness. Then, on Christmas Eve, the ghost of his old partner appears, bound in chains, and warns him that three more spirits will follow. One by one, they take him through his past, his present and what may lie ahead.
Charles Dickens’s story is a ghostly parable about a hard heart, and about how a person can change. It has been adapted countless times, yet its original form, short, humorous, dark and warm in turn, is a pleasure to hear. In five sections and just over three hours, this recording brings the old miser and his visitors to life and reminds us why this story is told every winter.
Introduction
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) wrote A Christmas Carol in a few weeks in the autumn of 1843, and it was published a few days before Christmas of that year. It was an immediate success and has never been out of print. The book is the best known of several Christmas stories that Dickens wrote, and it did much to shape the way the holiday was imagined in Britain and America.
The structure is simple and effective. The book is divided into five parts, which Dickens called staves, a musical term, so that the whole story is conceived as a carol. In the first, Scrooge is introduced as a man who has closed himself off from others. In the following parts, he is visited by spirits who show him scenes from his life and from the lives of others. The story combines comedy, ghostly atmosphere and social concern, and Dickens writes with evident feeling about poverty and about the responsibility that comes with wealth. It is also a story about memory: the past in this book is neither forgotten nor comfortable, and it must be faced.
Dickens himself gave public readings of the tale, and it has always lent itself to being read aloud. Hearing it is perhaps the best way to enjoy its rhythm and humour.
The recording has five sections and lasts about three hours. It is read by volunteers for LibriVox. Why listen today? Because a story about generosity and second chances never goes out of date. It is short enough to enjoy in one evening, and it is just as good on the twentieth hearing as on the first.
Public domain
Charles Dickens died in 1870: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text