SOURCE: “Retelling A Christmas Carol: Text and Culture-Text,” in American Scholar, Vol. 59, Winter, 1990, pp. 109–15.

In the following essay, Davis explores how the innumerable retellings of Dickens's novella have changed the essential story and have kept the tale relevant in modern times.

The words of a dead man Are modified in the guts of the living. 

—W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”

So far from the Christmas Ghost Story being a colourable imitation of [Dickens's] book, numerous incongruities in the Carol, involving the unhinging of the whole plot, have been tastefully remedied by Mr. Hewitt's extended critical experience of dramatic effect and his ready perception of harmonies … to … a more artistical style of expression and of incident.

—Brief defending Hewitt's piracy of the Carol, 1844

Dickens is a terrible writer. In the original, Scrooge was mean and stingy, but you never know why. We're giving him a...