mister fezziwig (13. 001)

Though each time I picked up on the narrative again, telling myself I don’t have time to listen to a two-and-a-half-hour podcast, I did make it all the way through this dramatic reading of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas from The Allusionist host Helen Zaltzman. The novella, divided into five chapters—which Dickens calls staves, reflects and informs the zeitgeist at a time when Victorian England was reevaluating holiday customs and was his fourth attempt at the subject, first a serialisation called “Christmas Festitivies,” then a short story under the title “A Christmas Dinner” that appeared in his illustrated anthology Sketches by Boz and an episode in The Pickwick Papers, “The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton”—a sacristan, a church superintendent charged with care and maintenance of the building and cemetery grounds, misanthropic but after being ransomed by the creatures undergoes a conversion, similar to Scrooge. Capitalising on its success, Dickens wrote another four holiday themed novels (The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life and The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain) but none of the franchise as beloved as his 1842 iteration. Familiar adaptations are true to Dickens but I realised I had never listened to original narrative in its entirety, rather excellently delivered (with a few, non-intrusive short asides to gloss antiquated meanings) and really enjoyed the decision to voice the Ghost of Christmas Present aptly as a South Park character. It is a banger of a story and of course you have time to indulge.