音频来自牛津“书虫"系列《圣诞欢歌》选段

《圣诞欢歌》简介

　　A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost-Story of Christmas, commonly known as A Christmas Carol, is a novellaby Charles Dickens, first published in Londonon 19 December 1843. The novella met with instant success and critical acclaim.

　　BACKGROUND

　　Dickens was not the very first author to celebrate the Christmas season in literature, but it was he who superimposed his humanitarian vision of the holiday upon the public, an idea that has been termed as Dickens' "Carol Philosophy". Dickens believed the best way to reach the broadest segment of the population regarding his concerns about poverty and social injusticewas to write a deeply felt Christmas story rather than polemical pamphlets and essays. Dickens' career as a best-selling author was on the wane, and the writer felt he needed to produce a tale that would prove both profitable and popular. Dickens' visit to the work-worn industrial city of Manchester was the "spark" that fired the author to produce a story about the poor, a repentant miser (守财奴), and redemption that would become A Christmas Carol.

　　The forces that inspired Dickens to create a powerful, impressive and enduring tale were the profoundly humiliating experiences of his childhood, the plight of the poor and their children during the boom decades of the 1830s and 1840s, and Washington Irving's essays on old English Christmas traditions published in his Sketch Book (1820); and fairy tales and nursery stories, as well as satirical essays and religious tracts.

　　PLOT of The Book

　　A Christmas Carol tells the story of a bitter old miser named Ebenezer Scroogeand his transformation into a gentler, kindlier man after visitations by the ghost of his former business partner Jacob Marleyand the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come.

　　Dickens divides the book into five chapters, which he labels "staves", that is, song stanzas or verses, in keeping with the title of the book.

Stave One

　　The tale begins on a "cold, bleak, biting" Christmas Evein London, exactly seven years after the death of Scrooge's business partner Jacob Marley. Scrooge, an old miser, is established within the first stave as "a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, covetous (贪婪的), old sinner!" He hates Christmas, calling it "humbug"; he refuses his nephew Fred's Christmas dinner invitation, and he sarcastically turns away two gentlemen who seek a donation from him to provide a Christmas dinner for the poor and needy. His only "Christmas gift" is allowing his overworked, underpaid clerkBob Cratchit Christmas Day off with pay – which he does only to keep with social custom, Scrooge considering it "a poor excuse for picking a man's pocket every 25th of December!"

　　At home that night, Scrooge is visited by Marley's ghost, who is forever cursed to wander the earth dragging a network of heavy chains, forged during a lifetime of greed and selfishness. Dickens describes the apparition (幽灵) thus: "Marley's face ... had a dismal light about it, like a bad lobsterin a dark cellar." Marley has a bandage under his chin, tied at the top of his head; "... how much greater was his horror, when the phantom taking off the bandage round its head, as if it were too warm to wear indoors, its lower jaw dropped down upon its breast!"

　　Marley tells Scrooge that he has one chance to avoid the same fate and that he will be visited by three spirits, one on each successive evening and that he must listen to them or be cursed to carry chains of his own that are much longer than Marley's chains. As Marley departs, Scrooge witnesses other restless spirits who now wish they could help their fellow man, but are powerless to do so. Scrooge is then visited by the three spirits Marley spoke of – each visit detailed in a separate stave – who accompany him on visits to various Christmas scenes.

　　Stave Five

　　Scrooge awakens on Christmas morning with joy and love in his heart. He spends the day with Fred's family and anonymously sends a prize turkey to the Cratchit home for Christmas dinner. The following day, he gives Cratchit a raise and becomes like "a second father" to Tiny Tim. A changed man, Scrooge now treats everyone with kindness, generosity, and compassion; he now embodies the spirit of Christmas.

　　As the final narration states, "Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms. His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him...it was always said of him that he knew how to keep Christmas well if any man alive possessed the knowledge." The story closes with the narrator repeating Tiny Tim's famous words: "God bless us, every one!"