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‘What connexion can there be between the place in Lincolnshire, the house in town, the Mercury in powder, and the whereabouts of Jo the outlaw with the broom,’ asks Dickens’s narrator in Bleak House. As the novel develops, it offers various possible answers, including disease, family, money, and friendship.

The post Dickens, Dickens-Style: How the BBC are making use of the ‘streaky bacon’ effect appeared first on OUPblog.

Today we have two books from the Little Masters, Baby Lit® Books collection from publisher Gibbs Smith, author Jennifer Adams, and illustrator Alison Oliver.  The first, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, is a coloring primer that will paint this week’s big day red and green. Then Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a counting primer, will put [...]

Following yesterday’s recipe for roast goose by Mrs Beeton, here’s that classic Christmas dinner portrayed by Charles Dickens in the famous scene from A Christmas Carol. Here Ebeneezer Scrooge watches with the Ghost of Christmas Present as the Cratchit family sits down to roast goose and Christmas pudding.

‘And how did little Tim behave?’ asked Mrs Cratchit, when she had rallied Bob on his credulity, and Bob had hugged his daughter to his heart’s content.

‘As good as gold,’ said Bob, ‘and better. Somehow he gets thoughtful, sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.’

Bob’s voice was tremulous when he told them this, and trembled more when he said that Tiny Tim was growing strong and hearty.

His active little crutch was heard upon the floor, and back came Tiny Tim before another word was spoken, escorted by his brother and sister to his stool before the fire; and while Bob, turning up his cuffs — as if, poor fellow, they were capable of being made more shabby — compounded some hot mixture in a jug with gin and lemons, and stirred it round and round and put it on the hob to simmer; Master Peter, and the two ubiquitous young Cratchits went to fetch the goose, with which they soon returned in high procession.

Such a bustle ensued that you might have thought a goose the rarest of all birds; a feathered phenomenon, to which a black swan was a matter of course — and in truth it was something very like it in that house. Mrs Cratchit made the gravy (ready beforehand in a little saucepan) hissing hot; Master Peter mashed the potatoes with incredible vigour; Miss Belinda sweetened up the apple-sauce; Martha dusted the hot plates; Bob took Tiny Tim beside him in a tiny corner at the table; the two young Cratchits set chairs for everybody, not forgetting themselves, and mounting guard upon their posts, crammed spoons into their mouths, lest they should shriek for goose before their turn came to be helped. At last the dishes were set on, and grace was said. It was succeeded by a breathless pause, as Mrs Cratchit, looking slowly all along the carving knife, prepared to plunge it in the breast; but when she did, and when the long expected gush of stuffing issued forth, one murmur of delight arose all round the board and even Tiny Tim, excited by the two young Cratchits, beat on the table with the handle of his knife, and feebly cried Hurrah!

There never was such a goose. Bob said he didn’t believe there ever was such a goose cooked. Its tenderness and flavour, size and cheapness, were the themes of universal admiration. Eked out by apple-sauce and mashed potatoes, it was a sufficient dinner for the whole family; indeed, as Mrs Cratchit said with great delight (surveying one small atom of bone upon the dish), they hadn’t ate it all particular, were steeped in sage and onion to the eyebrows! But now, the plates being changed by Miss Belinda, Mrs Cratchit left the room alone — too nervous to bear witness — to take the pudding up and bring it in.

Suppose it should not be done enough! Suppose it should break in turning out! Suppose somebody should have got over the wall of the back-yard, and stolen it, while they were merry with the goose — and supposition at which the two young Cratchits became livid! All sorts of horrors were supposed.

Hallo! A great deal of steam! The pudding was out of the copper. A smell like a washing-day! That was the cloth. A smell like an eating-house and a pastrycook’s next door to each other, with a laundress’s next door to that! That was the pudding! In half a minute Mrs Cratchit entered — flushed by smiling proudly — with the pudding, like a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of half-a-quartern of ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top.

Oh, a wonderful pudding! Bob Cratchit said, and calmly too, that he regarded it as the greatest success achieved by Mrs Cratchit since their marriage. Mrs Cratchit said that now the weight was off her mind, she would confess she had her doubts about the quantity of flour. Everybody had something to say about it, but nobody said or thought it was at all a small pudding for a large family. It would have been flat heresy to do so. Any Cratchit would have blushed to hint at such a thing.

At last the dinner was all done, the cloth was cleared, the hearth swept, and the fire made up. The compound in the jug being tasted, and considered perfect, apples and oranges were put upon the table, and a shovel-full of chestnuts on the fire. Then all the Cratchit family drew round the hearth, in what Bob Cratchit called a circle, meaning half a one; and at Bob Cratchit’s elbow stood the family display of glass. Two tumblers, and a custard-cup without a handle.

These held the hot stuff from the jug, however, as well as golden goblets would have done; and Bob served it out with beaming looks, while the chestnuts on the fire sputtered and cracked noisily. Then Bob proposed:

‘A Merry Christmas to us all, my dears. God bless us!’ Which all the family re-echoed.

‘God bless us every one!’ said Tiny Tim, the last of all.

A Christmas Carol has gripped the public imagination since it was first published in 1843, and it is now as much a part of Christmas as mistletoe or plum pudding. The Oxford World’s Classics edition, edited by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, reprints the story alongside Dickens’s four other Christmas Books: The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life, and The Haunted Man.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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Image credit: Reproduced from a c.1870s photographer frontispiece to Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol. By Frederick Barnard (1846-1896). Digital image from LIFE. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

The post Christmas dinner with the Cratchits appeared first on OUPblog.

5 Stars Scrooge: A Christmas Carol & A Remembrance of Mugby Charles Dickens Papercutz 96 Pages   Ages: 8 and up   Scrooge is actually two books in one. In addition to the traditional Dickens classic  A Christmas Carol there is also another Charles Dickens classic, A Remembrance of Mugby. Chances are good you have not [...]

This Day in World History

December 19, 1843

Dickens publishes A Christmas Carol

“Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it.” So begins a staple of Christmas celebrations, Charles Dickens’s novella A Christmas Carol.

Dickens’s book, of course, relates the conversion of the crabbed miser Ebenezer Scrooge to a warm-hearted man who embraces Christmas after a night of visits from the ghost of his old partner, Jacob Marley, and three time-traveling spirits, those of Christmas Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas Yet to Come. Dickens’s work became an instant classic. All 6,000 copies of the first printing were sold by Christmas, and the 2,000 copy second printing that quickly followed was also quickly sold out. Its lasting charm is evidenced by countless plays, radio dramatizations, television specials, and movie adaptations that have followed, a new one, seemingly, each generation.

While A Christmas Carol is probably Dickens’s most beloved work, it did little to alleviate the financial trouble in which he labored in 1843. At the time, Martin Chuzzlewhit was being serialized, but sales were slow. With his wife expecting the couple’s fifth child, Dickens penned the Christmas story in the hopes of a financial boost. Despite the brisk sales, his income did not rise as desired. The cost of producing the book—all resulting from Dickens’s own decisions, as he supervised the printing and hired the illustrator—was so high that the author saw few profits. Dickens lamented that “I shall be ruined past all mortal hope of redemption”—ironic, given that A Christmas Carol demonstrates that redemption has nothing to do with one’s financial condition.

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By Anatoly Liberman

Humbug may have fallen into disuse if Uncle Scrooge had not repeated it with such relish. Coined or made fashionable some time around 1750, it managed to disguise its origin most skillfully. John Fielding evidently liked humbug, for in 1751 he made one of his characters use it. People with a refined taste raged against this “very low word,” but it stayed and continued to puzzle etymologists. In the welter of conjectures about its origin the most important clue seems to have been discovered, though accidentally, but what we read in dictionaries is not quite satisfactory, for they either use their favorite formula “of undiscovered/ obscure origin” or state that humbug is made up of hum and bug. The truth of the latter statement cannot be denied, and this is probably indeed how humbug came into being, but we have to understand the process of coining. Someone could not simply have taken two building blocks—hum and bug—and put them together. Humbug is not like pancake or haywire, which are undoubtedly pan + cake and hay + wire, for a pancake is indeed a kind of cake and haywire is a kind of wire, while (a) humbug is not exactly a bug, even if we refer to the sense of hum “to cajole, flatter” and to that of bug “goblin, bogeyman.”

Here are the definitions of humbug from some dictionaries: “an imposition, an imposture, a hoax, deception; baloney, nonsense, rubbish; a false alarm; bugbear; a cheat.” “A false alarm” and “bugbear” are outdated. Turning to the origin of the word, we should remember that at its inception it seems to have been a piece of inane, perhaps even odious, as someone called it, but fashionable slang and thus could have come from a foreign language, or it could have been a cant word that the “swells” suddenly appropriated and admired precisely for its vulgarity. (“You are so hideous, that we positively like you. Let’s fly to the nearby swamp. Some young females, very pretty maidens, live there, and your awful looks may have success there,” said two recently hatched geese to the Ugly Duckling.) I think Greek and Latin etymons should be ruled out, because if, for example, Latin ambages “quibbling, subterfuge,” mainly used in the ablative form ambage” (to cite the most often mentioned putative source from a classical language) had been reshaped into humbug, the result would have been humorous rather than “very low.” Also, the second a in ambage is long, and, considering the rules of the 18th-century pronunciation of Latin, the pun would probably have yielded umbage, stressed on the second syllable and rhyming with beige or rage, regardless of initial h (added to mock the Cockney accent?). Nor does the derivation of humbug from Irish uim bog “a worthless coin” (literally, “soft copper”), pronounced more or less like Engl. oom-bug, and also without h-, inspire much confidence. The despised coin was minted under James II and withdrawn in the reign of William III, but William was crowned in 1689 and died in 1702. The word humbug, which took England by storm, would probably have surfaced in texts earlier if it had been a widely known term of abuse in Ireland in the reign of either king. A dancing master named Humbog has been unearthed. The name is curious and not to be dismissed as irrelevant, but the master was active in 1777, too late to account for the popularity of humbug. Other guesses are even less interesting. Especially unprofitable is reference to Hamburg as the source of

I’m reading A Christmas Carol with my son.

He’s nine. I’m sure he’s not understanding half of it. Every now and then, when I read a bit that seems particularly difficult, I check with him to see if he’s got it; and usually he hasn’t, so I explain it to him.

And yet, he’s transfixed. He’s loving it. I’m reading half a chapter at a time - there are only five - and he’s with me all the way.

I think there are two reasons for this. Or, perhaps, three; but I’ll come to the third in a minute.

Reason number one: Scrooge. Was there ever a more disagreeable, yet more sympathetic, old sinner anywhere in all of fiction? From the start, we begin to know him even as we disapprove. And we laugh, too; my son’s first response, when I asked if he was enjoying it, was: “He’s funny.” Yet we understand him, and when - actually very quickly - he begins to feel again, we can believe in his reawakened feelings, and feel for him.

Reason number two: The language. Words can be like music, and you don’t always need to “understand” music to appreciate it. I’m convinced one of the reasons my boy isn’t getting bored and wandering off is that, quite simply, the words make a nice sound. To be honest, there are sentences I don’t entirely understand myself, but they’re great to read aloud.

So there you have it; in less than 150 words, my thoughts on why Dickens can be appreciated by a nine-year-old.

But what about reason three? Ah. Well. That one, I think, has less to do with Dickens, and more to do with me and my son.

You see, I’ve been building up to this for a couple of weeks: telling my boy that I want to read this book with him this year, and that I think he’s old enough for it. For both of us, I think, this particular story has become one of those special father-and-son events, imbued with a magic that neither of us wants to risk breaking. It’s attained something of the significance of a rite of passage; and so, it’s made us want to work at it. It may be difficult at times, but it’s worth the effort - both for what the story reveals, and for what it says about our relationship.

And, of course, it’s Christmas; and for many of us - me included - Christmas is a magical time; and the magic of this Christmas has become part of the magic of this shared story about a magical Christmas.

Time will tell - it’ll be interesting to see if he wants this story again next year - but I hope that when he’s grown, my son will remember the first time his dad read him A Christmas Carol, and will remember it with affection, as one of those many wonderful times when a story was more than just words.

Have a very merry Christmas, Awfully Big Readers, and - in the words of Tiny Tim - God bless us, every one!

John's website is at www.visitingauthor.com. His latest book is Jack Slater and the Whisper of Doom.

The CNMI House voted to give Rota $500,000 dollars for start-up costs of their casino. Merry Christmas!


But I'm feeling decidedly like Scrooge. $500,000 is a lot of money that could do more good used elsewhere, like at PSS or DPS or CHC.

The large majority of people in Saipan voted against casinos. And the CNMI's overwhelming majority of population is in Saipan.

So if the people of Rota want a casino, which THEY voted for, let them pay for it themselves. Bah Humbug!

The other day Kelly at Big A little a put out a call for great early reader suggestions. Suggestions done flew in. All is well. Kelly then posts her collected list online in a handy dandy PDF file. All continues to be well. I make a passing note of it, but otherwise don't think too much on the subject. Then, not five minutes after I've seen this list, a woman walks up to me.

Woman: I want a recommended list of early readers.

Me: . . . . . .

Woman: One that you could print out and give to me.

Me: . . . . . .

I immediately print out Kelly's list right-quick (we seem to have almost everything on it, thank goodness) and patron woman is incredibly happy. So thank you, Kelly. And for those of you out there in need of this list get it now. It's a bit of a time saver.

So I'm cruising the Children's Picturebook Price Guide for fun, and I come across this piece regarding the The "Top 1000" titles most widely held by Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) member libraries.

The site is poorly laid out, tricking you into believing that Tomie dePaolo's Mother Goose is number three when, in fact, Mother Goose in general is third. Fortunately, the aforementioned Children's Picturebook Price Guide has rounded up all the 172 children's titles for you. So see if you can spot what's wrong with the kidlit holdings. Here are the first numbers:

#3: Mother Goose
#7: Huckleberry Finn
#8: Lord of the Rings (trilogy)
#10: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
#14: Night Before Christmas
#15: Garfield
#16: Tom Sawyer

*screeeeeeeeetch* Back up, back up, back up.
Let me get this straight. GARFIELD is number 15 on the list of books that are in THE MOST libraries worldwide? GARFIELD? Are you pulling my leg?

Oh, it gets better. Garfield beat Aesop's Fables, Arabian Nights, and A Christmas Carol. He beat Treasure Island, Grimm Fairy Tales, and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. He beat, The Hobbit, Little Women, and (and here it gets insulting) The Diary of Anne Frank.

Jim Davis, I am not pleased. Even Peanuts had the good grace not to appear until #69 with Calvin and Hobbes bringing up the rear at #77 alongside Doonesbury (#88).

In any case, for a good time, scroll down to the later titles and see what comes up. I could read this thing all day.