In all of England, no man is as cold-hearted and miserly as Ebenezer Scrooge. Cynical, friendless, abusive of his good-hearted clerk, he broods on his fortunes like a
latter-day dragon. Not even the bells of Christmas can soften his heart of ice... until the night he receives an unwelcome visit from an old business partner - a man who
died seven years ago. Bob Marley was cut of the same selfish, greedy cloth as Scrooge - and, it seems, the latter may share the former's eternal torment in the afterlife.
Ebenezer's only chance at salvation lies with three ghostly visitors, who seek to teach him the errors of his ways and the true meaning of Christmas.
Review
Not a holiday season passes without half a hundred remakes, homages, and other blatant knock-offs of Dickens's original tale, so I figured I ought to try reading the
original. Though somewhat wordy (as one might expect of an author for whom verbosity was evidently money), it holds up reasonably well today. No real reason is given for Scrooge's
youthful turn from generosity to selfishness - and, given how many decades of his life he has dedicated to cultivating such miserly tendencies, he reverts to a feeling
and caring human being a little too easily. Since it's basically a dressed-up fable, though, I don't suppose I ought to be too critical. (Fable or not, though, Tiny Tim
makes a tooth-rottingly saccharine plot device.) While a little sappy for my personal tastes, I can certainly see why tale this remains a holiday classic.
Charles Dickens Public Domain Books Fiction, General Fiction Themes: Classics ***
Description
Orphaned Pip, brought up by the cruel hand of his sole surviving sister and her long-suffering blacksmith husband Joe Gargery, was often told how miserable a child he
was and how poor his prospects were. It never truly bothered him until the day he was invited to the estate of the reclusive Ms Havershim and met the old woman's ward, the
lovely Estella. It hardly matters to Pip that she's a cruel, capricious young lady, whose first meeting left him in tears as she insulted his low birth and coarse hands.
It hardly matters that a blacksmith's apprentice cannot hope to court, let alone win, someone of her prospects and stations. From that moment on, he determines he will
become a gentleman, even if he doesn't yet know how. When, some years later, a lawyer arrives to inform him that he has great expectations - an unknown benefactor of
prodigious means, who wishes him to move to London and raise himself in society - it seems the answer to his prayers... but dreams and reality are two very different
things.
Review
I suppose, yet again, my general lack of education shows here. Widely considered a classic, this story nearly bored me out of reading it several times. Dickens dances
around meanings and words in a way that had me wishing he'd encountered an editor as firm and swift with the switch as Mrs. Gargery. Granted, he was writing for a different
audience, with different literary expectations and societal understandings, than exists today. In his time, perhaps, it wouldn't have seen impossibly outlandish that a
woman would devote her entire adult life to nursing a single grudge, warping the lives of those around her and manipulating them to ridiculous extremes and degrees, or that
the entire adult population of a small village would devote itself to demeaning one young boy. Pip's unreasoning obsession with becoming "uncommon" and reaching the
unreachable heart of a lady who openly admits she has none might also have evoked less eye-rolling and tooth-grinding, as might his utter passivity through most of the
story. I will also grant that Dickens evokes some distinctive imagery and characters, though the latter often lean toward caricatures (with a few racial stereotypes thrown
in for good measure.) But it just plain takes too long in its meandering, painstaking setup. Dickens also fails to engage me in Pip's life, beyond the people he meets: for
all that he's a blacksmith's apprentice, I barely saw any of the forges, and when he's partaking of his gentlemanly education and pursuits, I'm given no real clue as to how
he's actually spending his time or what he's really doing. (Again, though, this may be a problem stemming from me being a twenty-first century American.) It isn't until well
past the halfway point that the pace picks up and the threads of Pip's long, verbose journey begin to come together in a most melodramatic manner - and Pip finally realizes
he's been an unlikable ingrate. The conclusion itself is just too neat to be believed. In the end, while I enjoyed some of the descriptions, and Dickens has a way of
creating memorable characters (in the supporting cast and around the periphery, if not in the starring role), I found the storyline too contrived, Pip himself too hard to
care about, and the whole thing just too long and slow for me to enjoy.
