How to adapt 'A Christmas Carol'

One story, probably apocryphal: when Charles Dickens died on 9 June 1870, a barrow girl near Covent Garden market was heard to exclaim “Dickens dead? Then will Father Christmas die too?” Another story, probably true: when Dickens finished writing A Christmas Carol in November 1843 after six weeks of furious work, he was seized with a “perfect convulsion of hospitality” and insisted on hosting a series of festive dinner parties. Dickens, in these anecdotes, is not merely an author who popularised Christmas traditions; he’s the embodiment of the season itself. Indeed, he seemed like a man possessed by it: jittery with nervous energy, he wrote during the day and spent his nights walking miles along London’s streets, accompanied only by the hiss of the gas lamp and the rumbling carts of the night-workers. 

We, in turn, repaid the favour. It’s hard now to imagine a Christmas without A Christmas Carol, though Dickens was hardly the originator of a certain brand of mid-Victorian nostalgia for earlier, vanishing Advent customs, nor the first to fuse them with the ideals of Christian charity. But what sets the novel apart is, quite simply, how good it is: eerie, funny, heart-breaking and heart-warming in equal measure. The story has its Damascene conversion, of course, but it also has ghosts both jolly and spooky, sinister n’er’do’wells, angelic children, time-travel, raucous parties. These reasons are no doubt at the heart of why the book has been adapted so many times — Dickens himself toured a version suited for listeners, staging one-and-a-half hour long readings throughout his lifetime (between 1853 and his death, he gave 127 such performances).