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Michael Patrick Hearn, ed. The Annotated Christmas Carol. New York: Norton, 2004. Pp. cxiv + 266. $29.95.
This new work joins Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz (also edited by Michael Hearn), Huckleberry Finn, and Classic Fairy Tales in the Norton annotated editions series, and although none of these is a children's edition, all obviously are books that have long attracted readers of different generations and have been extensively illustrated and adapted for other media. The Annotated Christmas Carol provides parallel columns of text and annotation, with text in black and annotation in pale green (as are all the page numbers and top-ofpage trim). With its red and gold dust jacket and hard cover design encircling the dancing Fezziwigs, this, like the original 1843 Christmas Carol, is an eye-catching volume, and just as Dickens kept the price of his book low, so is The Annotated Christmas Carol a bargain. For those not well acquainted with the story of how the Carol was such a timely work in 1843 and such a focal point for any later overview of Dickens's career, Hearn provides a rich and accurate, although not always easy to use, account. The volume includes over one hundred pages of introduction, followed by the one hundred fifty pages of annotated text, and a lengthy appendix containing an introduction and text of A Christmas Carol in Four Staves (Dickens's 1867 public reading version). The selective bibliography lists separately Dickens's works, notable editions of A Christmas Caroi, notable editions of Christmas Books, studies about Dickens, about his work, and about the Carol But unless one comes to the book for a particular purpose (such as mine for this review), users may become disoriented between text and commentary as columns of annotation occasionally run a page or so beyond the page where original text calls for explanation, and some annotations are peripheral and many are too long.
Acknowledging, but certainly not supplanting Paul Davis's superb study of Carol adaptations through the 1980s, The Lives and Times of Ebenezer Scrooge ( 1990), and Fred Guida's excellent A Christmas Carol and Its Adaptations (2000), Hearn's Annotated Christmas Carol begins by stating that this "most popular work of England's most popular novelist.. .has had a remarkable life of its...