I usually re-read A Christmas Carol around this time of year, but this time I read The Chimes, the Christmas book of the following year, which Dickens thought his best, though not many readers have agreed with him. It is more overtly political than the Carol, aiming directly at the government policies which generate poverty and degradation, so it is perhaps a better tract for our times. It opens powerfully – ‘There are not many people ... who would care to sleep in a church’ – and continues with a vivid evocation of the moans and whimpers a gusty wind can make in a church at night. But there are too many characters and too many interwoven events, and the earlier story’s starkness of focus on the protagonist’s memories and regrets is lost in the dazzle of the author’s technical virtuosity. I also listen to compilations of carols. Our household favourite is a CD included in the BBC Music Magazine for December 1995, called Music for Christmas (A Concert of festive music from around Europe). The sleeve-note explains that all the material is ‘Taken from a 14-hour live radio broadcast by European Broadcasting Union members, transmitted to 25 countries on December 18th 1994’. There are choirs from Helsinki, from the St Thomas Church in Leipzig, from Seville and Jerez, from the Slovak Radio Folk Instrument Orchestra, and from the Tatra Mountains, on the Polish border. It is the Europe we are losing, and it ends with the great choir of King’s College, Cambridge. But I have never listened to that choir’s Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at 3.00pm on Christmas Eve, which is the moment when Christmas begins for so many. Somehow, the poised, high-art perfection of that event makes me prefer the last-minute scramble of ‘shopping and chopping’. On the 1995 carols CD, the folksy bits are sung with a certain gusto – you can hear feet being stamped on wooden boards in proper, not-quite unison. As in Dickens’s Chimes, the technical virtuosity displayed at King’s is just a touch too much, so that something of the simplicity of the Christmas spirit seems to be missing. Illustrations 1. The Old Church, Clarkson Stanfield, 1844, Wood engraving. Full-page illustration for Dickens's The Chimes: Third Quarter. Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham. Taken from the Victorian Web. 2. Cover of the 1995 BBC CD. Comments are closed.
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