Sponging The Stone

I DON'T REMEMBER reading the book until my adult years, yet Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol seems always to have been with me. The Carol entered my life when I lay on the living room floor with a belly full of Christmas turkey avoiding adult conversation at my grandmother's dinner. My first recollection of the story is in the form of the 1951 American film version Scrooge. Alastair Sim, the most robust interpreter of Scrooge, fascinated me by his depiction of a man who starts off as "solitary as an oyster" and winds up a "second father" to

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A Response to Jack Maggs

LITERARY SCHOLARS HAVE called Jack Maggs a post-colonial re-telling of Dickens' Great Expectations. As I read it, Jack Maggs, by the witty Australian author Peter Carey, is a deconstruction of Charles Dickens himself. The message tears apart the pretensions and presuppositions of the great man, turning the original message of Great Expectations on its head and giving us a more satisfactory resolution than the original. 

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A Response to Transforming Scrooge

There is a distinction between the actual story of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens and the interpretation of the story, the Carol "canon" (from the word measurement). The story is there for us unchanged, to be read year after year, but the fit, the measurement of the Carol's meaning, is constantly changing. Joe Cusumano provides a creative and inspiring measurement for Dickens' famous tale, as well as placing the original story in the appendix. While acknowledging the traditional meanings of the story and providing an excellent historical background, Cusumano filters A Christmas Carol through the novel lens of spiritual

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A Review of The Last Dickens

The Last Dickens was a great improvement upon the Poe Shadow; it was more akin to Matthew Pearl's first novel, The Dante Club. Both of these books are extremely well reed and tied to both the text and the tonality of the era in which they are set.

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A Review of The Mystery of Edwin Drood

Once I got over the Dickensian style, especially the delicate china doll description of his woman protagonist, Rosa Bud, I was hooked. This sadly foreshortened-by-death novel reveals as much in its superb descriptions, including a humanly depicted dish set, that speaks to the reader, as it does in its plot.

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