Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol Through History, Literature, and Film

Since it was first published in 1843, Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol has never been out of print, been translated into more than three dozen languages, and been adapted into hundreds of radio, stage, and film productions over the past 180 years. For millions of people around the world, (re)reading or (re)watching A Christmas Carol is an annual tradition. Our course applies an interdisciplinary approach to deepen and enrich our understanding of Dickens's classic tale about nineteenth-century British society, notably questions of power, wealth, inequality, and ethics. We analyze A Christmas Carol by closely reading the novella, placing it within its historical context among pertinent primary sources, and analyzing a selection of the modern film adaptations that reimagine and reconstruct Dickens's story.