June 2021: A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

The Pickwick Book Club is a community of local bookworms, students, and teachers who meet monthly to discuss a nineteenth-century novel. Perhaps the best-known and most widely beloved of Dickens’s works, A Christmas Carol is the story of one man’s conversion from miserly misanthropy to a belief in the goodness of mankind and an acceptance of his place in the larger human community. Set against a background of social and economic distress during the “hungry ‘forties” in England, the Carol is at once an indictment of economic individualism and a powerful exploration of dreams, memory, and the importance of self-reflection.

Preparation for the Discussion: We will try something different for our discussion of A Christmas Carol later this month. Because most of you are familiar with this novella and we will be discussing the story extensively during the virtual Dickens Universe, we would like to take a personal approach at the Pickwick Club. Session facilitator Carl Wilson has requested that each person select a favorite sentence or short passage (no more than 50 words, please!) to read aloud to the group.

This is similar to the Dickens-to-Go process but much more abbreviated. You may love a passage because of Dickens’s language, an unusual word you didn’t know before you read it here, or you may love a phrase because of how an actor delivered it in one of the many adaptations of the story over the years.

Please be prepared to speak for 2-3 minutes about why this passage has meaning for you.

We hope the multitude of passages will allow you to view this story with fresh eyes and enable us to get to know one another a little better.

Recommended Edition: We recommend the Oxford World Classics edition of the novel, but other versions are acceptable. Download the novel to read at Gutenburg.org or to listen to LibriVox.org. 

The Santa Cruz Public Libraries provide support for the reading group.