“Spirit,” said Scrooge, after a moment’s thought, “I wonder you, of all the beings in the many worlds about us, should desire to cramp these people’s opportunities of innocent merriment.”
“I!” cried the Spirit!
“You would deprive them of their means of dining every seventh day, often the only day on which they can be said to dine at all,” said Scrooge. “Wouldn’t you?”
“I!” cried the Spirit.
“You seek to close these places on the Seventh Day!” said Scrooge, “And it comes to the same thing.”
“I seek!” exclaimed the Spirit.
“Forgive me if I am wrong. It has been done in your name, or at least that of your family,” said Scrooge.
“There are some upon this earth of yours,” returned the Spirit, “who claim to know us, and to do their deeds od passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings to themselves, not us.”
Gosh, it’s nice to know that after 180 years, Dickens is still a dangerous radical. Fred Guida, who saw every version of A Christmas Carol worth seeing (and plenty that were not) found only one, in Spanish, which includes this scene. Why do you suppose that is?
IT REQUIRES A FOOTNOTE: Bakers, forbidden to sell bakery on Sunday, nonetheless had to keep their ovens running, for starting up a cold oven on Monday would not have provided good baking. Poor people, having no oven at home, would pack up a Sunday dinner and take it there to rent a little space in the oven, as we saw people doing last time around and and we shall wee the Cratchits doing later. Some people felt this honored the letter of the law but violated the spirit, and wanted this practice shut down.
THE GHOST OF CHRISTMA PRESENTS, SPEAKING FOR ALL CRHISTANITY, COMES OUT IN FAVOR OF INNOCENT MERRIMENT RATHER THAN STRICT ADHERENCE TO THE COMMANDMENTS.
THE GHOST OF CHRISTMAS PRESENT, SPEAKING FOR ALL CHRISTIANITY, MAKES THE POINT THAT CHRISTIANITY SHOULD NOT BE BLAMED FOR ALL THE IDIOTIC THINGS PEOPLE DO IN ITS NAME.
SCROOGE IS SHOWN SOFTENING. This is probably the main reason: the Scrooge we heard back in the office chatting with the Charity Solicitors would not have worried about eh Sunday dinners of the poor. And some filmmakers are just not ready for Scrooge to be reasonable yet.
FUSS FUSS FUSS #13 The Reading version
A Christmas Carol was Dickens’s second most popular public performance, surpassed in the number of times he gave it only by his performances of the trial scene from the Pickwick Papers. What this meant was that he went on tinkering with it long after the official text was published. Like a lot of authors, he felt he could have done better, given a second chance. For the twenty-fifth anniversary edition, he replaced the charming original preface with another one in which he apologizes for not having spent more time on it, fleshing the characters out better, giving more of their background (and generally destroying his chance of producing a Christmas Classic.)
What remains of his tinkering goes the other way, however. He cut the Carol down into a two hour reading, and later cut it back farther to 85 minutes. We know he added bits as well, but he doesn’t seem to have written these down and they are lost. But his cuts, along with his performance notes, did survive, and can be seen in “A Christmas Carol: The Reading Version”, published in 1971 by the New York Public Library (which holds the prompt books) with notes and introduction by Charles Collins.
What is interesting, not to say alarming, is the number of what we consider classic bits that he cut. In the one hand, of course, they were not as classic when he did his readings. On the other, it would seem to prove that the author is not always the best judge of his own text.
Among the cuts were
The doornail
“Business! Mankind was my business!”
The wandering spirits outside Scrooge’s window
“She died a woman, and had, as I think, children.”
“Why to a poor one most?”
The two Significant Children under Christmas Present’s robe (he felt this would be a turn-off to certain audiences)
“It’s likely to be a very cheap funeral.”
“You don’t mean to say you took ‘em down, rings and all, with him lying there!”
“However and whenever we part from one another, I am sure we shall none of us forget Tiny Tim.”
“Heaven, and the Christmas Time, be praised for this! I say it on my knees, old Jacob; on my knees!”
“The Spirits have done it all in pone night.”
The meeting with the Charity Solicitors on Christmas morning
Blogsy Babbles 