dai wainscott’s Reviews > A Christmas Carol > Status Update

Enjoy! I find this one utterly delightful, start to finish. I read it every December (usually along with two of the other five Dickens Christmas stories—most years The Chimes, and The Cricket on the Hearth, both of which I recommend!). It's always interesting coming, finally, to the original story which you've long known through adaptations or cultural osmosis. I just read Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde for the first time and it was wild how much about that story I either had wrong or didn't know! And now I'm reading Frankenstein, another one I "know" but don't know, and it, too, is proving so different from what I thought!

Apparently there are two versions of Frankenstein as well, so you might have another adventure waiting if the story changes are significant enough. I'll check into other Dickens stories as well. Thanks!

Yes, indeedy; the 1831 edition is different from the original (1818) and the second (1823) editions. My copy has a Note on the Text after the intro which says, "In the first edition copy of her novel that she gave to Mrs Thomas in 1823 . . . Shelley made a number of autograph corrections, additions, & marginal notes . . . [e.g.,] she writes, 'If there were ever to be another edition of this book, I should re-write these two first chapters. The incidents are tame and ill-arranged — the language sometimes childish. — They are unworthy of the rest of the narration.' For the 1831 edition she not only rewrote these 'two first chapters', but also divided the old Chapter II into what becomes the new Chapters I and II, the old Chapter II now becoming Chapter III . . . The removal of some of the 'tame and ill arranged' incidents had what I consider to be the unfortunate effect of eliminating a certain amount of scientific language from the text . . . In doing so, she perhaps made it harder for future readers to identify with the speculative nature of this period of scientific endeavor . . ."

Luckily for me, my copy (a 1990s era Penguin Classics) collates the major changes between the 1818 original and the 1831 edition on which my copy is based. I was origally going to read those changes as I went, but it was breaking up the story. So, instead, I'm going to read it through and then check the back to see how the 1818 edition differed!

Re: Dickens, I hope you can find the other stories! I was given a little copy that had those three stories in it, and my SO has a copy that includes all 5 Christmas/New Year's stories, so maybe you'll encounter something like that!

They are available online on the Project Gutenberg site. I'll get them uploaded to my Kindle. I've been on an free ebook bonanza recently after learning Amazon made my old Kindle obsolete. So I'm stuffing it with free classics from Project Gutenburg and Standard Ebooks.

SO smart; I wish I had thought of that! That happened with my first gen Paperwhite a little while back and I didn't think to do that. Well, while you're at it, I'm going to throw out some unsolicited recommendations!

Make sure to get David Copperfield and Bleak House, as Dickens goes (those are my favorites but really get all Dickens haha); get Jane Eyre; get all of Austen (!!!); get Hardy's Tess, Jude, and Far from the Madding Crowd (and others; those are just the ones I know!); get some Elizabeth Gaskell (any; I've only read North & South); get some Elizabeth Bowen (any, probably; I've only read The Death of the Heart); get some Trollope (haven't ready any yet myself but people live him!); get Robinson Crusoe! Hmmm... Oh! Mrs Dallway (Woolf) just turned 100 last summer, so get that too! :)))