From Michael Hancher, Professor of English in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of MN, comes news of this article, timely for the season:
“Grafting A Christmas Carol�
Michael Hancher
SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Volume 48, Number 4, Autumn 2008, pp. 813-827
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Abstract: The piracy of A Christmas Carol that provoked Charles Dickens to sue (at considerable cost) for copyright damages in the Court of Chancery appeared as a two-penny issue of an ephemeral magazine called Parley’s Illuminated Library. Although it was long thought to be lost, this pastiche survives in a bound volume of that journal among other quoted and “reoriginated� works. This essay characterizes the unusual textual mixtures that make up that volume, and notices especially the hybrid qualities of Dickens’s “reoriginated� Carol.
