Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Dickens: A Christmas Carol

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

This famous short story from 1843 was so popular and so influential it served to revive the celebration of the Christmas holiday in Western European culture. (Remember, here in New England Christmas was not celebrated at all until the mid-nineteenth century.) It created Christmas as we know it now. Charles Dickens's prose narrative has been adapted for stage and screen in all manner of variations. There are numerous musical adaptations which include the operatic. Thea Musgrave's A Christmas Carol (1979) springs to mind. A recording of that opera was aired on this program on Sunday, December 23, 2018.

This Christmas I want you to hear the original story exactly as Dickens wrote it, as read by David Timson, a wonderful dramatic interpreter of the text. His voice may well captivate you. Timson has made over a thousand broadcasts(!) for BBC Radio Drama. Storytelling by the warmth and flickering light of the hearth has been a Wintertime and Yuletide custom going way back into antiquity. So gather round the radio: let it be your audio fireplace, and listen to the all-time classic ghost story.