Mr Dickens and his Carol

Several years ago, I wrote a short story about Charles Dickens and the invention of his famous novel, A Christmas Carol, loosely based on a legendary tombstone in an Edinburgh graveyard.

Since then, other authors have climbed on that same bandwagon and given their own versions. There was a book, then the film The Man Who Invented Christmas, which I have neither read nor seen, and then there is this one, Mr Dickens and his Carol by Samantha Silva.

Dickens is going through a difficult period in his career. His latest novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, has failed (mainly due to disfavour in America) and his publishers are threatening to have him pay them unless he comes out with another sure-fire winner in time for the Christmas trade.

He has numerous other mounting debts and his home life is also somewhat in disarray and, soon after giving birth to their sixth child, his wife Catherine decamps with their other children to her family in Scotland.

Wandering the night-time streets of his beloved London, Dickens struggles with ideas and the looming deadline. In the process, he encounters a young woman in a purple cape, Eleanor Lovejoy, who appears to be an actress. As their paths mysteriously cross time and again, he becomes entranced by her. Their meeting and her influence on him are pivotal to the plot which is only revealed towards the end of the book.

Packed to the brim with the sights, sounds and smells of mid-19th Century London that reflect much of the florid descriptions in Dickens' own work, this is an entertaining and often humorous read, with colourful characters, both real and imagined, from Dickens' life. The cornucopia of description can be just too much in places with perhaps the creation of the novel itself taking second place, but there is joy in this tale and it is a love letter from the author to the man himself. As she says: "I know you were a flawed man who had a heart as big as the world. That you saw Christmas as a time to reconnect with our humanity and revel in even our smallest blessings."

In spite of its few flaws, this is a tale to be read it in the spirit of Christmas and how to seek goodness in the world.


Four stars

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