At the last canonical entry on this year's calendar (Advent 9), I made so bold as to compare Trollope and Dickens. I made the insolent (not to mention pseudish) comment that I find Dickens a little de trop. Well today I find myself only three days down the line and having to walk back my prejudice. I have actually read A Christmas Carol. It is, of course, nigh on impossible to come fresh to this text, besieged as we are by any number of adaptations and parodies of it. However I find myself able to say that the original is terrific.
Dickens is a sentimentalist but a master of the cleverly inserted authorial voice. Take this passage for example where he affectingly draws us in so as to be at his very shoulder as the story unfolds itself. If I were to teach on writing (which thank the lord I do not have to do) I would be very tempted to get my students to excavate this passage for technique and meaning:
The curtains of his bed were drawn aside, I tell you, by a hand. Not the curtains at his feet, nor the curtains at his back, but those to which his face was addressed. The curtains of his bed were drawn aside; and Scrooge, starting up into a half-recumbent attitude, found himself face to face with the unearthly visitor who drew them: as close to it as I am now to you, and I am standing in the spirit at your elbow.
God Bless Us, Every One!
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