Bringing A Christmas Carol To Steubenville
One of the Year's Highlights Arrives This Weekend
Most of our work in the bookshop is getting excellent books to people who want them. Looking at our numbers from this year I see that we have sold about 13,000 books so far in 2024. It seems a wild and amazing thing, to have this kind of impact on thousands of people. So many times a new period of our lives begins when we first come upon a book. So often we seem to live more abundantly because of the experience found inside a book. We help people achieve that, “in our shabby little office” here in Steubenville.
We have another task as well: not only getting people things to read, but creating a literary culture, public and shared experiences of the goodness that comes into our lives from literature. One of the great experiences we offer is coming in just a few days, Richard Corbo’s one man performance of A Christmas Carol, Reclaiming the Carol, which goes up at the Sycamore Center on December 14th at 5 p.m.
A Christmas Carol perhaps does not get enough credit for how unusual it is. Its basic idea is contained in this paragraph:
I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach!
Needless to say, this particular meaning of Christmas is not found in the Gospel readings, and the more one reflects on it, the more peculiar it seems. Some have claimed that A Christmas Carol is too much vaguely altruistic bonhomie and not enough Christ. I think there is a profundity in it that repays repeated consideration. C. S. Lewis thought this was the distinguishing characteristic of literature, its capacity to sustain and indeed require re-reading.
A Christmas Carol is unusual because it adapts itself so easily to public reading: it is theatrical in its shades and tones. I have read it alone multiple times, and supplemented those readings with theater and movies: I was lucky enough to see Patrick Stewart do his one-man show of it twice in New York City. All I will say about that show here is that no recording could ever capture how astonishing those performances were, how he gripped us in the audience, how we were moved and delighted and moved again. The various movie versions all have something to recommend them too.
Last year I was contacted by John Walker, of the Franciscan University Theater Department, and he offered the services of his friend Richard Corbo for our bookstore. He did his show Reclaiming the Carol here (review in the Herald Star here), and it was one of the two or three best events we have ever done. In the dim light of the bookshop it looked like Dickens himself was in our store; and of course in a way he was.
This year we have booked a larger space, at the Sycamore Center, because we filled out little shop too easily last year. The show deserves to be seen by every person in Steubenville. It is a remarkable celebration of Christmas; it is a remarkable testament to the power of words to enrich our lives; and it is one of the few works of art I know which resolutely points us back to life, and asks that we live better. It makes me grateful for Dickens, whatever his faults may have been. One of the best pieces of literary criticism was uttered shortly after the book’s publication, when a woman said simply of the author, “God bless him.” May all us writers someday write something that makes others call down blessings upon us from God!
[Tickets and information about Reclaiming the Carol here. Come join us! And the week following, on the 21st of December, we have another amazing event, Christmas With Chesterton. I love that we can do such things.]