Recommendations from our site
“It’s something like a modern myth: like most myths, you can dress it up in lots of different clothes and populate it with different characters. You can do almost anything with it—the basic story will still remain the same. It’s ancient and it’s modern; it’s foreign and it’s familiar.” Read more...
The best books on Dickens and Christmas
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Literary Scholar
“The great importance that Christmas has now was not always so. With the Puritan revolution of the 17th century, the Puritans tried to outlaw Christmas. They were only partly successful but in England, in the century and a half following that period of revolution, Christmas was de-emphasised to a surprising extent. It was only in the 1840s that Christmas came roaring back, partly because of the influence of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert – who came from a German background where they didn’t have Puritans to mess with their holiday – but the other great influence is Charles Dickens and A Christmas Carol.” Read more...
Bruce Forbes, Theologians & Historians of Religion
