This weekend, my partner and I dressed up as Victorians to go and see A Christmas Carol, and eat an amazing feast between acts. The pease pudding was surprisingly dull but the rest was delish! It was great fun and a wonderful little pre-birthday treat for Mike.
I’ve always been drawn to The Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens and how people still love to read and watch it. You’d think that in this day and age we wouldn’t be interested in the morality tale where a character begins with a fatal flaw that is either corrected through the course of the story or the character gets their just desserts.
So often we’re told that fiction shouldn’t be black and white, and the lesson should be more ambiguous, but the titans of the morality tale still endure: The Christmas Carol, Dr Faustus (a favourite of mine), Animal Farm, Brave New World, Metamorphosis, Pride and Prejudice etc.
The reason they are still being read and loved is because the lessons in these novels are still relevant today. They touch on things we are still wrestling with even now:
From miserly to generosity, famine to feast (A Christmas Carol)
From powerlessness to power (Animal farm)
From judging to fairness and grace / Don’t judge a book by its cover (Pride and Prejudice).
All work and no play makes Jack not even a boy (dehumanise) (Metamorphosis)
These themes and lessons run through a lot of modern day fiction too, which are proving more and more relevant with social media and our Neoliberal society, giving us a chance to reinvent them:
Don’t believe everything you hear/see.
One who steals has no right to complain if he is robbed.
It is possible to have too much of a good thing.
Please all and you will soon please none.
Don’t pretend to be something you aren’t.
Honesty is the best policy.
Your Prompt
So as part of a ‘retelling series’ I’ll be doing, we are going to have fun with rewriting some classic morality tales but with a modern slant.
Today, we will take on the structure and lesson of The Christmas Carol where money is worshipped over human life and put our own modern day slant on it.
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