Old Scrooge, Young Dickens

There is an excellent Modern Library edition of Charles Dickens's Christmas novellas--not only "A Christmas Carol," but the less familiar "The Chimes" and "A Haunted Man." After the success of "A Christmas Carol," readers looked for a Dickens story each Christmas season, and he continued to produce them. Perhaps the best known of these later stories is "The Cricket On the Hearth."

Most of us are accustomed to seeing portraits of the author in late middle age--bearded, slightly balding, wrinkled, all the ravages of time. But the portrait on this Modern Library edition shows him as a young man, unbearded, longhaired, delicately handsome. It was painted by David Maclise in 1839, when Dickens was 27.

Four years later, Dickens published "A Christmas Carol." And this is the almost hard to believe truth: that a 31-year-old created the crabbed old miser Ebenezer Scrooge.

The introduction to the Modern Library edition is by John Irving, who writes of watching the Alastair Sim film in a tent of the Great Royal Circus in Junagadh, Gujarat in northwest India. It's a good opening for Dickens's Christmas classic.

The other surprise, perhaps, is that "A Christmas Carol" is short, just over one hundred pages. It can be read in one sitting, and probably should be.

In his own short introduction, Dickens wrote "I have endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their house pleasantly."