A Ghostly Little Book : Gerald Dickens
Courtesy Photo-Gerald Dickens.
On December 19th in 1843, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens was first published. The first edition was sold out by Christmas Eve. The story couldn’t have come at a better time as Christmas was not really celebrated to the extent it is today…in fact, it was falling out of fashion. We have Dickens to thank for much of our traditions, including the saying Merry Christmas, the wish for snow and holiday feasts. Of course, he also believed that you couldn’t have Christmas without a few ghost stories, which makes A Christmas Carol the perfect combination for reviving the Christmas spirit.
Charles Dickens wanted to share this story with the world and so he began performing public readings of the story, using different voices for each character. He performed A Christmas Carol well over one hundred times, with the last of the performances happening the same year he died in 1870.
Gerald Dickens, the great-great grandson of Charles Dickens, has taken up that torch. For the last twenty years, Gerald has been mesmerizing audiences with his live performance of the classic tale.
Courtesy Photo-Gerald Dickens.
Gerald will be the first to tell you that it wasn’t necessarily his idea. He said, “My father was very knowledgeable and gave a lot of speeches and talks about Charles Dickens. It kind of surrounded us, but there was never any expectation or pressure to do anything about Charles Dickens one way or the other.” As a young man, Gerald found his home in the theater and was pursuing acting when a charity reached out to him to see if he would be willing to perform A Christmas Carol as a fundraiser. Thanks to his family history, he was able to get the actual script that Charles Dickens used for his readings and built his performance around that rather than the actual book which would have taken almost four hours to perform. The rest as they say is history.
Courtesy Photo-Gerald Dickens
In 2020, his unforgettable one-man show was captured on film for everyone to enjoy for the holiday season! Gerald took viewers on the magical journey of Ebenezer Scrooge’s heartfelt transformation by acting out all 26 characters in this favorite holiday tale. We hope this will be a continued tradition!
Gerald joined us for our virtual Christmas Fairytales event on December 20th, 2020. We also had dramatic performances depicting two of Charles Dickens classic characters, Ebenezer Scrooge and Septimus Hicks. Septimus told us about the history of A Christmas Carol and taught us how to make the classic Smoking Bishop punch that appears in the novella. Charles Dickens also loved to give magic lantern performances at Christmas and to recreate that nostalgia we performed a late 1800’s style magic lantern show during this event. It was a lovely evening full of the Christmas spirit!