The City by The Bay Celebrates Dickens At Christmas

      It is likely that A Christmas Carol stands as Charles Dicken's best-known story, with frequent new adaptations. It is also the most-filmed of his stories, with many versions dating from the early years of cinema. According to the historian Ronald Hutton, the current state of the observance of Christmas is largely the result of a mid-Victorian revival of the holiday spearheaded by A Christmas Carol. Dickens catalyzed the emerging Christmas as a family centred festival of generosity. Its archetypal figures (Scrooge, Tiny Tim, the Christmas ghosts) entered into Western cultural consciousness. A prominent phrase from the tale, 'Merry Christmas', was popularized following the appearance of the story. The term Scrooge became a synonym for miser, and his dismissive put-down exclamation 'Bah! Humbug!' likewise gained currency as an idiom. Novelist William Makepeace Thackeray called the book "a national benefit, and to every man and woman who reads it a personal kindness".

 

Visit the official web pages belonging to the annual Dickens Fair.

Dickens Returns On Christmas Day by Theodore Watts.

(A ragged girl in Drury Lane was heard to exclaim, "Dickens dead? Then will Father Christmas die, too?" June 9, 1870.)

 "Dickens is dead!" Beneath that grievous cry 

London seemed shivering in the summer heat;

 Strangers took up the tale like friends that meet:

 "Dickens is dead!" said they, and hurried by ;

 Street children stopped their games-they knew not why,

 But some new night seemed darkening down the street;

A girl in rags, staying her way-worn feet, 

Cried, "Dickens dead? Will Father Christmas die?"

 City he loved, take courage on thy way!

 He loves thee still in all thy joys and fears :

 Though he whose smiles made bright thine eyes of gray-

 Whose brave sweet voice, uttering thy tongue- less years,

 Made laughters bubble through thy sea of tears- 

Is gone, Dickens returns on Christmas Day!