The New York Public Library, Berg Collection of
English and American Literature
A Christmas Carol, The Reading.
An opening from Dickens's prompt-copy of A Christmas Carol, marked up by him with cuts, interpolations and a direction for vocal expression ("Tone to Mystery"). The scene comes from Stave I of the novel, and includes the famous moment when Scrooge arrives home to find on his front door "not a knocker, but Marley's face." Kate Field, who was in the audience many times during Dickens's 1867-68 reading tour of America, recalled how in the performance of the Carol, "the magnetic current between reader and listener" set in with the introduction of Scrooge. And that when Scrooge was startled by the ghostly knocker, so was Field: "Of course Scrooge saw it, because the expression of Dickens's face, as he rubs his eyes and stares, makes me see it, 'with a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar.'"