What Dickens Actually Wrote

With such a multitude of ways to deliver a ghost story, I've chosen to take a subtle approach, but there's not just me. Not by a long long way!

This November, Paramount Pictures releases Ebenezer : A Christmas Carol, a major Hollywood adaptation of A Christmas Carol directed by Ti West and starring Johnny Depp. From what we have seen so far it promises to be a darker, wilder take on the story, which is entirely in keeping with a director known for pushing genres into unexpected places.

I'm looking forward to it.

This will not be the first adaptation of A Christmas Carol I have enjoyed and it won't be the last. The frequency with which filmmakers, playwrights, composers and choreographers return to this story is one of the most reliable measures of its greatness. It has been a musical, a ballet, a Muppet film, a three part BBC drama with Guy Pearce more recently that took considerable artistic license and which I grew to love, and now a Paramount Pictures production with one of Hollywood's most recognisable faces at its centre. The story absorbs everything and remains itself. That is what great literature does.

But alongside all of that there is another version. The one Dickens wrote.

Not the novel, though the novel is wonderful. The reading text. The version Dickens created specifically to perform himself, roughly one third of the original novella, distilled to its essential heart and designed to be delivered by a single voice to a live audience. Dickens toured this version for years, performing it to packed houses across Britain and America, and it is every bit as carefully crafted as the novel itself. What he kept in was kept in for a reason and what he left out he decided an audience did not need.

That is the version I perform. Every word is Dickens'. The narration is mine alone, as it was his. The presentation is as close to his original performances as I can manage, with the addition of a little sound and a little light that I like to think he would have approved of and used himself had they been available to him. Beyond that, it is the story as he told it. As close to a Victorian evening with Dickens as it is possible to get in 2026.

There are no wrong ways to enjoy A Christmas Carol. See the film, read the novel, watch the Muppets, listen to an audiobook. Every version that sends someone back to the story, or reminds them why they loved it, is doing something worthwhile.

But if you want to hear the words exactly as Dickens wrote them, performed by a single narrator in an intimate space, this December you can. He did it first. I'm just keeping it going.

Tickets at vintageverse.co.uk/a-christmas-carol/tickets