My long-standing affection for Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol began with a well-thumbed Ladybird Classics for children. The cover featured a suitably Dionysian Spirit of Christmas Present, robe spilling open, holly entwined in his locks, exuberantly perched on a mound of culinary extravagance. A throne of Christmas puddings, fat sausages, iced cakes, turkeys, fruit and cheese, from where he smiled down benevolently at a skinny sea-green Scrooge, dressed in night clothes and bedroom slippers. I find out now that the image is a much enhanced version of the original first-edition illustration by John Leech from 1843. “Scrooge was the meanest man in the world,” began my ‘retold’, abbreviated version. “He hated everybody and everything — especially Christmas. Then one cold Christmas Eve, his life changed…”

With over 30 stage and television adaptations, almost as many films, three operas, a couple of graphic novels, half-a-dozen parodies, and too many spin-offs to mention, it’s difficult not to be familiar with the story. Scrooge is visited by the apparition of his dead partner Jacob Marley, who warns him of three spiritual visitations that night — Christmas Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas Yet to Come. He must listen to them or be similarly cursed to drag around chains far longer than Marley’s own.

As a child, I was happily unaware that Dickens wrote this slim novella propelled by a burning sense of injustice for the victims of the Industrial Revolution. He decided that the best thing he could do was write a story, not an article to call public attention to their inhuman working conditions. “Something,” as he said, “that would strike the heaviest blow in my power.” I was mostly enthralled by the festive images in the book. Prince Albert, the newly installed husband of Queen Victoria, brought from his native Germany the tannenbaum, or Christmas tree in 1841. Shortly after, Dickens with A Christmas Carol , institutionalised what one could call the recognisably modern ‘spirit of Christmas’. Stockings and wreaths, crackling fires and mistletoe, Yule logs and terrace houses softly covered in snow. His writing was so strongly associated with the December holiday season that when he passed away in 1870, a young girl is said to have asked, “Mr Dickens dead? Then will Father Christmas die too?”

My warm Assam winters were far removed from Victorian England — but it didn’t stop my sister and I from trying to faithfully recreate a white wonderland, exhausting, in the process, the household stock of cotton wool.

My next brush with the text took place in school in the form of a stage adaptation. One so generic that I cannot, for the life of me, remember the playwright. I remember little from that creative endeavour, except that our Scrooge — a tall, feisty girl named Supantha Gogoi — found the script much too extended, and threatened to leave until we came to a compromise. She’d play Scrooge of the present, while I’d take up the part of Scrooge whisked away on his adventures with the ghostly trio. How we managed to capture the audience’s wilful suspension of disbelief with these theatrical shenanigans, I’ll never know. Admittedly, it probably had more to do with amateur lighting that bathed us mostly in darkness rather than scintillating acting prowess.

Our most convincing character was Jacob Marley, played by the lovable Animikha Dutt, who expertly rattled the dog chains we’d wreathed around her at all the right cues. For ghostly luminescence, we’d dressed her in a white salwar, and dusted so much powder in her hair that, for a week, a little cloud emanated from her head when she sneezed.

All these years later, I have finally read A Christmas Carol .

The edition I own is nowhere as charming as the first, with its exquisite hand-painted illustrations (if you’re so inclined, it’s available online from Sumner & Stillman for a measly $39,500). But I found this one in a second-hand shop in Rochester, Kent, one of Dickens’ favourite towns (descriptions of it litter Pickwick Papers and Great Expectations ), and it bears the school stamp of having been presented, in 1908, to a certain Master William Smith for Diligence and Good Behaviour.

It isn’t, I’m surprised to find, a children’s book at all. The first line echoes grim and cold, “Marley was dead: to begin with.” And the ‘staves’ (or song stanzas, in keeping with the title) are peppered with discomforting descriptions. A woman dying in the gutter with the ghosts of rich businessmen dancing around her, the two ghoulish children, Ignorance and Want, that the Spirit of Christmas Present pulls out from beneath his robe, the silent, hooded Spirit of the Future who shows Scrooge his unloved grave. It is a small work of glowing genius. Deeply scathing and angry, funny and skittish, epic and intimate. Even now, acting as an appraisal of all our deeds and misdeeds. It gently demands a re-read at every year’s end. So we can enter the new one with its closing line: God bless us, everyone.

(Janice Pariat is the author of the novel Seahorse>@janicepariat )

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