Profs & Pints Alameda: Dickens’s Christmas Myth

Profs and Pints Alameda presents: “Dickens’s Christmas Myth,” an appreciation of the cultural impact and staying power of A Christmas Carol, with Ian Duncan, professor of English at the University of California Berkeley and scholar and teacher of Charles Dickens and other nineteenth-century British authors.

[Tickets available only online, at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/alameda-dickens .]

A Christmas Carol, the first of Charles Dickens’s series of Christmas books, enjoyed immediate popular success in its own time, and it has gone on to generate a flood of retellings, adaptations and revisions, from one-person readings and stage musicals to live-action and animated movies. It’s one of those rare works of literature that has transcended its source to attain archetypal or mythic status in the modern imagination.

What is it about Dickens’s tale that keeps it so alive, so fertile?
Come to Faction Brewing in Alameda to hear that question tackled by Ian Duncan, a scholar of Dickens whose recent publications about the author include examinations of Dickens’s relations to early evolutionary science and to Victorian anthropology.

Professor Duncan will discuss how Ebenezer Scrooge, converted to seasonal goodwill by ghostly visitations, joins a select gallery of characters and situations—Robinson Crusoe on his island, Gulliver among the giants and Lilliputians, Frankenstein and his monster—that are meaningful eve to the millions who have never encountered their literary originals.

We’ll consider how A Christmas Carol has attained the status of myth—a universally shared story that conveys some essential value or aspect of experience—and discuss what constitutes a myth in our supposedly secular, enlightened, post-mythic modern culture.

It’s a talk that will give you a newfound appreciation of a beloved author and have you thinking about Christmases past, present, and future in a new way. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: From an Arthur Rackham illustration of a 1915 edition of A Christmas Carol (New York Public Library / Public Domain / tint added).