This week I was lucky to see a stage show of A Christmas Carol (here is a video promotion from the 2022 production) so before attending I re-read this classic story. I'm sure you know this famous tale so I thought I would share a few text quotes and book covers. You will also easily find abridged editions and I even discovered a board book!
“I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.”
“Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.”
“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
"The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas.”
“As good as gold,” said Bob, “and better. Somehow he gets thoughtful, sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.”
“No space of regret can make amends for one life’s opportunity misused!”
Just look at the wonderful illustrators I have found - Robert Ingpen, Roberto Innocenti, PJ Lynch, Quentin Blake, and Christian Birmingham.
- prodigiously
- bestow a trifle
- palpable brown air
- veneration
- impropriety
- homage
- tremulous
- incredulous
- fettered
- penance
- jocund (cheerful and light-hearted)
- odious
No comments:
Post a Comment