SOURCE: A Christmas Carol and Its Adaptations: A Critical Examination of Dickens's Story and Its Productions on Screen and Television, McFarland & Company, 2000, 11–36, 87–115.

In the following excerpts, Guida considers the literary, political, and economic roots of Dickens's novella and traces the various cinematic adaptations of the story in the twentieth century.

A true feast actually has nothing to do with what you eat … but with what you remember.

Jeff Smith, the Frugal Gourmet

“Dickens dead? Then will Father Christmas die too?”¹ This remark, reportedly overheard by the English writer and critic Theodore Watts-Dunton and attributed to a young female street vendor upon hearing of Dickens's death in 1870, tells us much about the unique position that Charles Dickens occupied on the Victorian landscape during his relatively short lifetime as a writer and public figure. His work touched everyone, including the desperate poor, many of whom could not read but nevertheless...