“A Christmas Carol” Reading by Bill Hughes

A Christmas Carol published in 1843, was the sixth of Charles Dicken’s twenty major works. His final work Edwin Drood was left half finished when Dickens died in 1870.

Charles Dickens gave his first public reading of A Christmas Carol on Dec. 3, 1867 at the Tremont Temple in Boston. On Christmas Eve, 1867 in Boston, a businessman named Fairbanks watched Charles Dickens read A Christmas Carol. The reading moved him so much he closed his factory on Christmas Day and sent every worker a turkey thereafter.

Bill Hughes’s reading is gently abridged for dramatic purpose from the restructured version Dickens created for his own United States reading tour of 1867/1868, which included stops in New Haven and Hartford in 1868 with readings of A Christmas Carol.