* A CHRISTMAS CAROL * MERCURY THEATER ON THE AIR *
CHARLES DICKENS, ORSON WELLES (1) AUDIO CD
A Christmas Carol is a Victorian morality tale of an old and bitter miser, Ebenezer Scrooge, who undergoes a profound experience of redemption over the course of one evening. Mr. Scrooge is a financier/money-changer who has spent his life concentrating on the accumulation of wealth and little else. He holds anything other than wealth in contempt including friendship, love and the Christmas season.
A Christmas Carol (full title: A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas) is Charles Dickens' "little Christmas Book" first published December 1843 and illustrated by John Leech. The story met with instant success, selling six thousand copies within a week. Originally written as a potboiler to enable Dickens to pay off a debt, the tale has become one of the most popular and enduring Christmas stories of all time.
In fact, contemporaries of the time noted that the popularity of the story played a critical role in redefining the importance of Christmas and the major sentiments associated with the holiday. Few modern readers realize that A Christmas Carol was written during a time of decline in the old Christmas traditions. "If Christmas, with its ancient and hospitable customs, its social and charitable observances, were in danger of decay, this is the book that would give them a new lease," said English poet Thomas Hood in his review in Hood's Magazine and Comic Review (January 1844, page 68). (summary Wikipedia.org)
The finest radio drama of the 1930’s was The Mercury Theatre on the Air, a show featuring the acclaimed New York drama company founded by Orson Welles and John Houseman. In its brief run, it featured an impressive array of talents, including Agnes Moorehead, Bernard Herrmann, and George Coulouris. The show is famous for its notorious War of the Worlds broadcast, but the other shows in the series are relatively unknown. This site has many of the surviving shows.
The show first broadcast on CBS and CBC in July 1938. It ran without a sponsor until December of that year, when it was picked up by Campbell’s Soup and renamed The Campbell Playhouse. (summary Wikipedia.org)