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- [00:00]
Host 1
With less than a minute till halftime.
- [00:03]
Arnie
Arnie, please put your phone down. You're missing your own kid's football game.
- [00:06]
Host 2
I know, hun, but a branch is blowing in front of the DIY video camera I set up and I keep getting annoying alerts.
- [00:13]
Arnie
The biggest fumble was not getting a local security Pro to install Alarm.com.
- [00:18]
Host 2
Alarm.Com. How would that help?
- [00:20]
Arnie
The Bensons have it. Their cameras filter out false alerts, but also detect trespassers and scare them away before they even get close to the house. How flashing lights, whistles. The camera even gets gives verbal warnings like, hey, you in the black jacket in the driveway. This is private property. Leave now.
- [00:37]
Host 2
Wow.
- [00:38]
Arnie
Best of all, the Benson's Alarm.com system is professionally monitored so they don't have to call for help in an emergency.
- [00:45]
Host 2
Huh. I really could put my phone away.
- [00:47]
Host 3
Yes.
- [00:48]
Host 2
Touchdown.
- [00:50]
Arnie
Let's get an Alarm.com system before the team goes to states.
- [00:53]
Host 1
Alarm.com, your home field advantage. Visit Alarm.com to find an authorized service provider.
- [01:07]
Host 4
Well, ho ho, ho, everybody. It's past Christmas, but I hope you had a great holiday and the ho ho hos are still appropriate. This is the bookcase with Charlie and Kate. Or as she likes to say, the bookcase with Kate and Charlie. That's the way it's registered.
- [01:19]
Host 3
That's how it should be, that's how it always has been and that's how it always will be. And ho ho, happy holidays to everybody who's listening right now. We hope you've had a wonderful Christmas with, with hopefully with your family, that you got to spend time with folks that you love, enjoying the holiday season.
- [01:36]
Host 4
We're going to break format a little bit. This being. Well, I don't know if it's a special show for December 26th and on, but anyway, we're going to break format. Kate said to us, said to me, dad, we've never done a classic and maybe this time it would be just fun to do a classic. And I thought, great idea. We had an opening for December 26th when we would post, and what classic fits the season better than A Christmas Carol? So we thought it would be fun to put two academics together who are Dickensians, Charles Dickens scholars, and talk about why Christmas Carol has become so beloved, so representative of the season. And secondly, what was Dickens doing? Why did he write this book? He'd written four novels. He was on his fifth. I think they told us, our Dickensian scholars, our Dickensian.
- [02:22]
Host 3
We don't wanna say Dickinsonian because we found out that that was Emily Dickens.
- [02:26]
Host 4
Right. So he was writing his fifth novel when he wrote the Christmas Carol. And it has so resonated with people through the ages.
- [02:35]
Host 3
Yeah, it has. And to the point where. I mean, this, to me, is a fascinating trend. And I fall. Apparently, I'm a trend follower. In this particular instance, when you said, we're gonna do the Christmas Carol, I thought, okay, I'll reread A Christmas Carol. I haven't read it and I don't know how long, and I start reading it and I go, never read this. Not. Not seen them up at Christmas Carols. A matter of fact, it's a tradition in. When I wrap the presents, that's the first thing I do, is I put up Michael Caine as Scrooge and Gonzo as Charles Dickens. And I wrap presents while listening to Gonzo and Rizzo talk about A Christmas Carol. And then between that and the stage plays and the movies and I don't know all of the Christmas cliches that go along with the Christmas Carol, I was absolutely convinced that I had read it. And not only was I convinced that I'd read it, I was convinced I'd read it more than once. So I felt really stupid when I read it. And I go, huh? I haven't read this at all.
- [03:27]
Host 4
No, I was exactly the same. I've read a lot of Dickens. And I thought, well, of course I've read Christmas Carol. It must have been years ago. And so I picked it up and I started to read it, and I thought, no, I haven't ever read this. And we said, I don't know if we cut it out of the conversation with our scholars or not. But we said, I think with the exception of the Bible, this is probably the book that most people think, my goodness, I've read that. But they haven't because they're so familiar with the stories that had been depicted so often on stage, on screen and on television. So it was really a treat to read it. And people should, as our Dickensians will say, the language is so rich.
- [04:04]
Host 3
When I say one more thing, not only is the language rich, but I think what will really surprise. And I really want to make a case for our listeners. Pick up a copy of A Christmas Carol. Not only is it not terribly long, but it's very funny. And I don't think of Dickens as a funny writer. And so the idea that I laughed out loud more than once when I was reading this book, which, again, I don't think of as a funny tale, you know, other than the fact that I had A friend say to me once, well, I don't understand what Scrooge is complaining about. If I could have, you know, one night and three ghosts show up and I could fix my entire life in that one night, I'd do it in a heartbeat. And I wouldn't complain. So.
- [04:42]
Host 4
So would I. I'd take that deal.
- [04:43]
Host 3
Yeah, I'd take that deal, too. So. But, I mean, the book is very funny and the narrator has a great personality. And this book, A Christmas will sing to you in a different way if.
- [04:55]
Natalie McKnight
You read the book.
- [04:56]
Host 3
I promise you, it was in some ways a revelation for me. And I loved this conversation with these two, with these two experts.
- [05:04]
Host 4
And it will sing to you if you listen to them because you'll get a different slant on why he wrote this, what he was thinking about, why he made a novella instead of a novel. Anyway, we should mention who these people are.
- [05:16]
Host 3
Oh, yeah.
- [05:17]
Host 4
We're joined a by Natalie McKnight. She is the Dean of the College of General Studies. She's a dean at Boston University, but for our purposes, more importantly, she's a Dickensian who is a Dickens. As I say, these are Dickens scholars.
- [05:30]
Host 3
And also Professor Joel Griffin is Professor of English in the Department of Humanities and the Arts at Worcester Polytechnical Institute, wpi. I loved, you know, I love too, that like, not only are these Dickens scholars, but they know each other. You get the sense that they hang out and every once in a while maybe they have a glass of eggnog over, as they affectionately refer to this book, over the Carol. They've shortened the title down to the Carol. So they are the people to talk to about this book and we really enjoyed it.
- [06:00]
Host 4
So Joel britton of Worcester WPI and Natalie McKnight of Boston University, the subject, Charles Dickens and A Christmas Carol.
- [06:13]
Natalie McKnight
We are so glad that both of you are joining us for our discussion of A Christmas Carol and about Dickens in general a little bit. I want to start with you. I am one of those people who had thought she had read it and started reading it and realized that she hadn't in fact read it. And from my research, I understand that's a broad category of people. So before we get into the meat of the novel, I wonder if you wouldn't mind making a case for reading the book rather than seeing it on stage or the Muppet movie or what have you. Why should you read A Christmas Carol?
- [06:46]
Joel Griffin
Well, yeah, you make an excellent point. There are so many. There's so many film versions and theatrical versions and everyone, almost everyone has seen at least Some of them, which is what gives people the sense that you had that surely you must have read it. But very few people do. And I actually do assign it in my classes. I know that Joel does, who's with us today as well. And I always make the case. First of all, the writing is beautiful. I mean, it rhetorically sophisticated. I really think understanding the arc, Scrooge's transformation, is only possible if you really dig into the language. Because you see the clues buried there, I think, right from the start. So if you're just kind of glossing over that, you're kind of missing the point. And then there are just these wonderful descriptive passages, which I know are not everybody's favorite thing, but I love them. Where he's describing shop windows at Christmas and he animates everything, like every little chestnut and every onion and every piece of fruit, and it just comes to life. So you just can't get that by just seeing it. Although I recommend doing that as well.
- [07:57]
Host 1
I think that it's very easy for people to, who have only seen adaptations to mischaracterize Scrooge, to see him as a simple miser. And he's so much more. Dickens makes him so much more. And that's part of why we're interested in his progress, why we care whether he winds up in a sort of hellish limbo like Marley, or whether he can actually get out of this mess that he's worked himself into.
- [08:34]
Host 4
Joel, when you assign this book, I presume, why did Dickens write it?
- [08:38]
Host 1
He had a complex mixture of at least three motivations. One of those is the mysterious creative impulse to make something which obviously Dickens had in spades. But he also wanted to strike a hammer blow for the poor, for the working class people. This was something that he'd wanted to try to do for some time before this. And then he had economic motivations as well. His career began with the publication of Pickwick Papers when he was 24 years old. And his career just took off. He was a superstar. Everybody was reading it, everybody was talking about it. He was the coolest thing. And then Oliver Twist came, and everybody loved that. And Nicholas Nickleby came, and everybody loved that. And his fourth novel and his fifth novel. And he was flying high and going to America and being treated like a rock. Rock star in America. And then he started writing his sixth novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, which is a very fine novel. But sales weren't what he'd hoped for, and sales weren't what his publisher hoped for. And he was supporting a big Family, the younger generation and the older generation. And for all I know, his siblings too. And he needed. He. He wanted a little cash infusion. And as he was writing Martin Chuzzlewit, all of Dickens's novels, by the way, every one of them was published serially in either weekly or monthly parts.
- [10:15]
Natalie McKnight
I was also fascinated as I was researching as to how many stories Dickens wrote about Christmas. Was there something specific that fascinated him about Christmas that wouldn't let go of him?
- [10:25]
Joel Griffin
Well, it really started, mostly started with A Christmas Carol. There is a Christmas scene in Pickwick Papers, which Joel just mentioned, and that was popular and is an interpolated tale on Pickwick Papers that involves a Christmas time event with goblins. But Christmas Carol was the first big adventure he made onto the Christmas scene. But then after that, he produced four more Christmas books, if you want to call them. They're really more like novellas. So Christmas Carol obviously was a success. He was trying to capitalize, maybe even literally on that success. But then he just came to be associated with Christmas in a way that was beneficial to him, maybe a bit of a burden to him as well. But he just kept playing that handout.
- [11:12]
Host 4
I want to come back to something that Joel said, Natalie, that struck me. He said his first five novels were all smash successes. And I remember, I think it was Dustin Hoffman who once said, well, there's an Ishtar in everybody's life, which was a terrible movie that he made. And. But if his first five novels were so successful, why did he need a buck to make a buck with the Christmas Carol? Why was he worried about his economics?
- [11:36]
Joel Griffin
Well, you know, as Joe mentioned, the novel that he was writing, when he also started writing Christmas Carols, Martin Chuzwit Knit was not doing well. And he was worried. And he had so many people depending on him. Both the family he created, but the family that he came from. And then people begging him for money, you know, strangers, philanthropists, constantly. It was like people just stuck a bunch of straws in him and they were all drawing at the same time. And so he couldn't afford as well as he had done. He couldn't afford having an unsuccessful novel. He had to just keep churning things out to stay afloat. So one of the things I love about Scrooge, exactly like what Joel was saying, you know, if you really look at the language around Scrooge, Scrooge is not just some simplistic Mazda that, you know, you turn a switch and he becomes better at all. I think Dickens was really feeling like Scrooge at this point in his life, so pestered for money. There's a scene in Christmas Carol where the philanthropists are asking Scrooge for money early on in the novella, and he just kind of waves them away with some pretty churlish language that is not like some other. That is really, I think, how Dickens was feeling just completely put upon.
- [12:51]
Natalie McKnight
Joel, I was asking myself as I was reading this book, the narrator has such a distinct personality. There is sarcasm, there is humor, their social commentary. Who is the narrator and who is the narrator's intended audience?
- [13:05]
Host 1
Well, I think the. The narrator is indeed a distinct personality, is willing to flirt with cliches. Marley was dead as a doornail, and then questions that, you know, why a doornail? And at some points, the narrator has a really spooky presence.
- [13:31]
Joel Griffin
I mean, I do think of the narrator as, in some ways, an extension of Dickens, of course, but you always want to keep them somewhat separate. A narrator is never exactly the same as the author. So this might be. It's certainly obviously influenced by Dickens perspectives on things and his wit and his anger. But it's always. It's a performance, right? The narrator is a performance for the audience. And Dickens was a really good performer.
- [14:02]
Natalie McKnight
But, Joel, I always get the sense in Dickens books that oftentimes the narrator's job is to speak truth to power. Is that the narrator's job in this book? And am I the reader, the power to whom the narrator is speaking?
- [14:17]
Host 1
Well, I think we were talking about how the narrator has an awful lot of Dickens in him. Dickens bleeds into the narrator, but Dickens also bleeds into Scrooge. And it's not just the money concerns. It's the wit, too. You know, Scrooge makes some very Dickensian kinds of jokes, some Dickensian kinds of puns. There's more of gravy than of grave in you and. And that sort of thing. And is the narrator speaking to power? Well, the narrator is speaking to the reader in a very friendly and maybe avuncular kind of way. And I think Dickens is clever enough to know that at this point in his career, absolutely everybody is reading what he writes. So, yes, it is rich and powerful people who might make a difference in, you know, social policy.
- [15:17]
Host 4
Kate asked about whether he's speaking to power, but my understanding is, in reading about Dickens, that he chose to write A Christmas Carol instead of some sort of political polemic that would have screamed about all the things that Scrooge was endorsing, like debtors, prisons and like poor houses, et cetera. He was worried about the conditions. And instead of writing a political polemic, he wrote A Christmas Carol. Thank goodness he did.
- [15:43]
Joel Griffin
Yes, I agree. Yeah, no, that's an excellent point. I think. Joel earlier used the phrase sledgehammer blow. He had promised to make a sledgehammer blow against treatment of the poor, particularly child labor laws, children working in factories, and he had thought he might write a pamphlet. But instead he wrote this. And he felt that this, the Christmas Carol, was 20,000 times the blow that any pamphlet would be. And he was right. There is a way in which fiction, which pulls you in imaginatively and makes you feel something, has a longevity and an impact that a pamphlet never, ever would have. He knew that.
- [16:25]
Host 4
So, Joel and Natalie, let's pause for just a moment, take a break, and we want to come back and talk to you some more about A Christmas Carol.
- [16:35]
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- [17:05]
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- [17:35]
Host 2
We have one more act for you this evening. I don't even need to say his name.
- [17:40]
Bob Dylan
Mr. Bob Dylan, a complete unknown, is now a Golden Globe in critics Choice nominee for best picture.
- [17:45]
Joel Griffin
Bobby, what do you want to be? Whatever it is they don't want me to be.
- [17:49]
Bob Dylan
Timothee Chalamet astonishes as Bob Dylan in one of the best performances of the year and critics rave. Edward Norton is absolutely fantastic.
- [17:59]
Host 4
70,000 people are here and Bobby is the reason for it.
- [18:04]
Joel Griffin
They just want me singing, blowing in the wind for the rest of my life.
- [18:07]
Host 3
How does it feel?
- [18:09]
Bob Dylan
Don't miss the movie. Critics are healing. Five stars to be on your own. It's pure cinematic magic.
- [18:16]
Host 3
Turn it down.
- [18:16]
Bob Dylan
Pay loud direction and named to AFI and the National Board of Reviews top 10 films of the year make some noise.
- [18:24]
Host 1
BD track some mud on the carpet.
- [18:29]
Bob Dylan
A complete unknown. Now playing only in theaters. Rated R. Under 1790. Middle without parrot.
- [18:40]
Host 4
Joel, let me again start with you, but ask both of you, did his Christmas Carol have any effect in bettering conditions in the kinds of ways that the poor were treated in England at that time?
- [18:52]
Host 1
I think, unfortunately, those kinds of effects are generally quite difficult to measure. The changes that Dickens created in his novels, exposing abuses of the Yorkshire schools in Nicholas Nickleby, or the New poor law in Oliver Twist, or legal shenanigans in Bleak House, the list goes on. And I think it's very difficult to see direct cause and effect.
- [19:21]
Joel Griffin
Yeah, no, it's very hard to make a direct line like, you wrote this, that this changed, but did child labor laws get better? Yep, they did. Now, granted, there were pamphlets out there and government reports on child labor that many people, including Dickens, were reading, and it caused quite a stir. So obviously, those were impactful, too. There were things that did improve access to education, labor, the cleanliness of the streets. Lots of things have improved that you couldn't draw a direct line to. But is it an influence? Yeah, I mean, I truly believe that it becomes part of how people see their obligation to others, and that then changes policy.
- [20:13]
Natalie McKnight
That's one thing that I read about, was that that was that. In some ways, Dickens was the first to connect. I think Scrooge's nephew says it beautifully. Christmas is a time where we all just become fellow travelers, the rich and the poor. And Dickens really was the first person to connect altruism, or one of the first people to connect altruism to the holiday that at this time of year, more than any other, to whom much is given is much is expected.
- [20:37]
Host 3
Was that fair?
- [20:38]
Joel Griffin
Absolutely. I mean, there's a lot that Dickens kind of resurrects about Christmas practices through this book and in his other Christmas writings, too. The practice of Christmas had actually been on the wane for. For decades due to evangelical and puritan influences, which found Christmas festivities to be kind of heathenish. Right. More like winter solstice celebrations, which, of course, they were. So. So, you know, in some places, Scotland wasn't even practice, you know, did not have celebrations of Christmas at this point. So Dickens resurrects this. And Washington Irving, our own author, did that as well, to a degree. And Dickens loved Washington Irving. But, yes, it's not like he just infuses life into it again. He infuses it with this spir of what is expected of us as human beings.
- [21:27]
Natalie McKnight
I also Wanted to ask, when we were talking about the writing before, you used words to describe Dickens that I don't generally think of as Dickensian words. Reassuring, simply festive. So is this the most optimistic of Dickens works?
- [21:42]
Host 1
Well, it's an interesting question. I think Dickens is a person who has remarkably clear sight and he describes reality, he describes what he sees and often that is unpleasant or worse. Reality is dangerous for a lot of people and Dickens was not afraid to see that and report that in any and all of his works at the same time. I think Dickens does have a fundamental optimism, not necessarily that people are basically good, although maybe there's that, but that at least people can be better. He knows that people are capable of wonderful things.
- [22:25]
Host 4
Natalie, you're both academics. Let me put this in a student exam. Gates question. Charles Dickens, optimist or pessimist? Discuss.
- [22:37]
Joel Griffin
Yeah, well, it changes over the course of his career. I think he's definitely more optimistic in his earlier works and I would still consider this in the first, you know, moving into his middle period, but in the early wave of optimism, he's still quite young. He gets definitely more pessimistic about the possibility of change, about government. And his endings are seldom as 100% positive as the ending of this novella. I think one of the reasons why it's so popular is that it does have such a satisfying, completely happy, redemptive ending. And it's a nice tight work too. It is a novella. It's not an 800 page baggy monster novel. Right. He sticks the landing, as I like to say, you know. Does he stick the landing? He sticks the landing. And in his, in later works, I think the conclusions are much more subdued or complex or ambiguous, you know, right up to Great Expectations, which has two endings, both of which are kind of ambiguous.
- [23:43]
Host 1
I was going to disagree, disagree a little bit and say that I think Dickens has some profound pessimism right from the get go too. Pickwick Papers, his first novel, is wonderfully funny and in some ways it could be his funniest novel. But it's not all fun and games. And there's the poor side of the debtors. Prison scenes are set there and people die there in Pickwick Papers. So Dickens has got his critical specs on and can can see what's out there from the beginning. And although novels like Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend have a great deal of darkness, these are later works, they also have a kind of optimism. The final word of Our Mutual Friend is gaily Mortimer fares to the temple gaily at the end. So he's got some optimism despite the terrible things that he hears from the voice of society. So I, I think it's difficult to pin him down as an optimist or a pessimist. He sees a lot and reports a lot.
- [24:57]
Host 4
Joel, you mentioned that when he was doing this as a performance, a dramatic performance, he came to America and you said was treated royally when he got here because he was so popular. But my recollection is he didn't like America. He criticized America, he didn't like the colonies. Is that right?
- [25:17]
Host 1
Well, he came to America and he was disgusted to find that Americans still held slaves. In 1842 he came and slavery was still a live thing. We hadn't gotten over that nasty habit by that time. He saw the greed and the ill, ill manners of people and he saw people spitting tobacco everywhere, not just at the ballpark, but on the floor of the White House. So when he got back from America, he wrote his first travel book, American Notes. And when Americans read it, they were not as enchanted as they had been when they saw the young and handsome almost 30 year old grace our shores.
- [26:08]
Joel Griffin
That said, he returns 25 years later, 1867. 68. And it's on that visit that he does his reading tour, doing Christmas Carol. He does it here in Boston, December 1867, at the Tremont Temple, by the way, which is still there.
- [26:23]
Host 1
And here in Worcester as well.
- [26:24]
Joel Griffin
And there in Worcester as well. Right. And did this tour and he came back, he had a very much more positive feeling about Americans because, well, we had gotten rid of slavery by that point, just. And he was recognized and applauded as a hero everywhere he went. They got over what he had said about them, but for the most part in American Notes and remembered him instead for his fiction, which they loved. So there's an arc there too, right. In his attitude towards America and even references when he's back here the second time, how his opinions have changed some.
- [27:07]
Host 4
Natalie, when you teach a Christmas Carol, what would you hope that the one primary thought of a student who walks out of your lectures has in his.
- [27:16]
Joel Griffin
Mind maybe at their young period of life? I would hope they take away the idea that the way you interact with everybody on a day to day, moment to moment basis matters. They come in, they write their essays for admission, saying how much they want to change the world in this way and that way and all these dramatic things. But I really try to emphasize that you can change the world. You are changing the world whether you want or not, minute by minute. You Change the world. You impact the world.
- [27:48]
Host 4
Joel.
- [27:49]
Host 1
I think a lot of what students say that they bring out of these inquiry seminars is a greater attention to language. It's a greater attention to Dickens's language, and it's a greater attention to their own. They have the opportunity to look at not only the first edition, but to look at facsimiles of Dickens's manuscript. And it's interesting for them to see that, you know, even things like Tiny Tim's name were not Dickens's first conception, but were things that needed to be worked out. In the. In the conclusion of the novel, we talked about how the. It's not a novel. Excuse me, the Christmas book. At the conclusion of the Christmas book, there's the statement that, that Scrooge was better than. Than his word and so on. And, and to Tiny Tim, who did not die, he became a second father. Well, that's not in the manuscript. Dickens didn't write anything about Tiny Tim in the final paragraph originally. He must have gotten proofs back from the printer and thought, oh, gee, I left that hanging. Maybe people will wonder whether Tim died or not. Maybe I should spell that out so you can, you can look in the manuscript and there's no trace of Tiny Tim there at the end. Until.
- [29:11]
Host 4
And there is no until.
- [29:12]
Host 1
God blesses everyone.
- [29:13]
Host 4
Until God blesses everyone. And there is no visit to the Cratchit home.
- [29:17]
Natalie McKnight
No.
- [29:17]
Host 4
In the.
- [29:18]
Natalie McKnight
No. That was how I knew I hadn't actually read it. I'm turning the pages, going, when do you go to the Cratchits? When do you bring the goose to the Cratchits? I think you're the Cratchits. But I'm so glad we did this. I'm so glad we talked to the both of you, because I had never read this and I'm so glad that I did. It's not just, you're right, it's. There is such beauty to the language. It is sparing language. And the idea that you could buy a 180 degree turn in a character in less than 100 pages is just a stunning accomplishment, I think, for a writer.
- [29:52]
Host 4
As Joel said, what you miss if you just see the movies or the adaptations, you miss the beauty of the language. Thank you both. It has been wonderful to have you here.
- [30:02]
Joel Griffin
Thank you for inviting us. I've loved it.
- [30:04]
Host 1
Yes, it was delightful to speak with you.
- [30:10]
Host 4
So I hope you enjoyed our breaking format a little bit and discussing a classic, as Katie wanted to do and I thought was such a good idea. And honestly, we'd love some feedback from you. We read very carefully the comments that are put on the Apple Podcast website. When people have listened and want to write a comment or want to rate us. And those comments we take very seriously. And we'd love to know if you thought this was a good idea and maybe we'll do it again with some different books, some different classics in the future. What do you think? You liked it?
- [30:38]
Host 3
Yeah, I mean, you know, not only. I mean, listen, you folks out there, you know, if you're gonna give us a loved it or hated it, stay away from the hated it. No, I'm just kidding. But here's where I would like some feedback is I would love to do more of these shows. I really enjoyed talking to these two and they came to play and they sure as heck know a lot about what they're talking about. And there are so many classics out.
- [30:59]
Natalie McKnight
There we could talk about.
- [31:00]
Host 3
You and I feel very strongly that Ulysses by James Joyce is a classic that shouldn't be. So, for instance, does anybody have any interest in our debating that for a little while? So I hope you guys will write us those book nerds out there who have opinions about the classics because I think they can make for some really lively debates. Everybody has their own opinion and there are lots of scholars and academics out there to have these great discussions.
- [31:24]
Host 4
Yeah, it would be interesting. Also, we take very seriously when you suggest bookstores for us to talk to. A number of times we have picked out bookstores that listeners have suggested. So we're going to remind you again of the people who make this podcast possible. A little different. For the coda, we asked both Natalie and Joel to pick out their favorite sentences from A Christmas Carol because they both were saying that if you, if you just watch the movies and if you just see the TV shows, you miss the richness of the language. So before we go to the credits and before we go to their favorite sentences, I want to read mine. It's right at the beginning, when Scrooge is still Scrooge and Dickens writes, and you mentioned his language is funny, particularly at the beginning. It gets a little more serious when the ghosts show up. But at the beginning, this is, I think on the first or second page. Oh, but he was a tight fisted hand at the grindstone. Scrooge. A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner, hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out. Generous fire, secret and self contained and solitary as an oyster. I love that.
- [32:31]
Joel Griffin
I do, too.
- [32:32]
Host 3
And again, I'm Still a big fan of the sentence Darkness is cheap and Scrooge liked it. I like that sentence because it's a mix of present and past tense and it works perfectly. And it's a funny sentence and it tells you so much about who Scrooge is without one descriptor. Darkness is cheap and Scrooge liked it. That tells you so much about a person. Again, to me, one of the great signs of a truly talented writer is that they can describe a person without ever describing them. That is a great sentence for that.
- [33:02]
Host 4
So the folks who make this possible, and then Natalie and Joel with their favorite sentences.
- [33:08]
Natalie McKnight
The Bookcase with Kate and Charlie Gibson is a production of ABC Audio and Good Morning America. It is edited by Tom Butler of TKO Productions. Our executive producers are Laura Mayer and Simone Swink. We want to make mention of Taylor Rhodes, Amanda McMaster and Sarah Russell. A Good Morning America and Josh Cohen, Asal Asanapour, Meg Fierro and Amira Williams at ABC Audio.
- [33:29]
Host 1
Well, one of my favorite sentences is right after, in the final stave, when Scrooge has managed to catch Bob Cratchit sneaking into work late, and he's putting on the mask of being a tough guy and threatening him. And then the punchline that Scrooge delivers is, well, I'm going to raise your salary. And the sentence that I want to draw your attention to is Bob's reaction. The narrator says, bob trembled and got a little nearer to the ruler. He's making sure that he's got a weapon handy that he can subdue this crazy man with until people can come in with a straight jacket. And I like that very Bob trembled and got a little nearer to the ruler.
- [34:18]
Joel Griffin
Oh, it's hard to come up with one, but why I have to cheat? I'll just say one is that whole last paragraph that wasn't there originally. It's just such a beautifully written paragraph. But I think if I have to pick one, it's going to be in the first stave, when you pick up on some of Scrooge's humor and when he's being, you know, most curmudgeonally, most miserly. He uses these kind of parallelisms in his sentence structure. You know, I'd have him boiled with his own pudding and buried with the stake of holly in his heart. That's a beautifully rhetorical sentence with a lot of iambs in it. And the reason I point that out is because when I teach it to my students, I say, look at this. He's early on. He's about as miserly as you're going to see him yet. He's playful with language, he's having fun with language. And that's your first sign that this guy is redeemable.
- [35:18]
Host 2
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