Practically since the day it was published — on Dec. 19, 1843 — “A Christmas Carol” has been required reading for the holidays. Upteen movie treatments later, not even a digitally manipulated Jim Carrey can dampen the tale of Scrooge, Fezziwig and Cratchit and Company.
But few take Charles Dickens’ little chestnut to heart more than Gerald Dickens, the writer’s great-great-grandson. Since 1993, he’s roamed the globe depicting all 26 characters in the tale, armed with little more than a table, a chair and a hat rack.
“People sob and laugh, and they often tell me it comes back to some memory of family times together,” he says. “They say, ‘I remember my grandfather reading ‘A Christmas Carol’ to us!’ ”
The 37-year-old British actor stopped into the Morgan Library & Museum in Manhattan recently for a peek at the real thing: the leatherbound manuscript a grateful Charles Dickens had given his solicitor, which J.P. Morgan eventually acquired and put on display.
Unfortunately for Gerald, aside from creative genes and a small leather traveling pack, none of Charles’ keepsakes were passed on to the family.
“After he died, everything was auctioned off, following the terms of his will,” he says. “I think the reason was, he didn’t want his children fighting over the manuscripts.”
Charles had 10 children (one died in infancy) and money was scarce, and the author never forgot the horror of the debtors’ prison that swallowed his own father, nor the factory he was thrust into at age 12.
Haunted by his past and the plight of many children in 19th-century industrial England, he wrote “A Christmas Carol” in a mere six weeks.
“I have endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me,” Charles wrote in its preface. “May it haunt their houses pleasantly.”
It certainly haunted Gerald’s Christmases. Growing up in the south of England, the youngest of four children, he has fond memories of “a very Dickensian Christmas, flaming puddings and all.”
It’s funny, he says, that in “A Christmas Carol,” Mrs. Cratchit is terrified the pudding’s not going to work, “and every year, my mother was always terrified that the big pudding or cake, the signature part of our dinner, would fail horribly. So it’s a tradition!”
Not that any of it helped him in school, he says. Not even Charles Dickens’ descendants could expect special treatment there.
“Quite the opposite!” he laughs. “We studied ‘Oliver Twist’ when I was about 14, and the rest of my class just stared at me with malevolence, blaming me for my family inflicting this on them.”
These days he spends Christmas on the road, or on cruise ships, reciting “A Christmas Carol.” (“And they call it work,” he chuckles). Charles — “who wanted to be an actor long before he took to writing” — would be proud.
His tale seems to resonate more than ever in a time of soaring joblessness and avaricious bankers. “The whole story of ‘A Christmas Carol’ and the message of what greed can lead to is very poignant at the moment,” Gerald says. “We all have Scrooge in us, but we have Bob Cratchit as well . . . We just need to get back to simplicity and away from that grasping and scraping.”