My Word with Douglas E. Welch

Christmas Past – 4 in a series – A Christmas Carol (1947), Performed by Lionel Barrymore; Richard Hale

Play and Download This Recording  from the Internet Archive

“Of all the roles I’ve done, the one I’d like best to be remembered for is Scrooge. It is unquestionably one of my favorites.” Lionel Barrymore, Dec. 21, 1947. The New York Times. (Interview with Dorothy O’Leary).

When MGM Records released A Christmas Carol in 1947, Lionel Barrymore had been playing Ebenezer Scrooge for twelve years on the radio. Starting in 1934, CBS presented the Charles Dickens’ classic story each year and it soon became a much loved Christmas tradition. Barrymore, in his radio debut, embodied Scrooge to perfection. As he  revealed in a 1947  New York Times interview, “I seem to shrink and an unnatural meanness of disposition comes over me. I seem to be Scrooge in body and mind.”

Barrymore went on to play the role 17 times before his death in November, 1954, and only the direst of circumstances prevented him from playing it. When his wife died in 1936 he was unable to perform, and his brother John rushed to fill in for him. He also missed the performance of 1938 when serious illness forced Orson Welles to substitute. — Library of Congress

“If there is any person in the town who feels emotion caused by this man’s death,” said Scrooge, quite agonised, “show that person to me, Spirit! I beseech you.”

The only emotion that the Ghost could show him, caused by the event, was one of pleasure.

“Let me see some tenderness connected with a death,” said Scrooge; “or that dark chamber, Spirit, which we left just now, will be for ever present to me.”

Charles Dickens. A Christmas Carol

Download A Christmas Carol for Free from Gutenberg.org 

Previously:

• The case of this unhappy man might be my own
• Are there no prisons?
• The boy is Ignorance. The girl is Want.
• …and taught Scrooge his precepts
• His offenses carry their own punishment
• There was nothing of high mark in this.
• Bob Cratchit’s house
• Come in and know me better man!
• …shadows of the things that have been.
• What Idol has displaced you?
• He has the power to render us happy or unhappy…
• …tuned like fifty stomachaches.
• It’s old Fezziwig alive again!
• Too much getting up by candlelight…
• The school is not quite deserted…
• “What”, exclaimed the Ghost…
• The First Ghost
• Mankind was my business…
• Speak comfort to me
• It is a ponderous chain!
• There’s more of gravy than of grave about you…
• Ask me who I was…
• The chain Marley drew…
• …double locked himself in…
• Darkness is cheap…
• Marley’s Face
• He lived in chambers…
• …even more congenial frost.
• …decrease the surplus population…
• …open their shut-up hearts freely…
• Boiled with his own pudding…
• …not being a man of strong imagination, he failed…
• Even the blind men’s dogs
• A tight-fisted hand at the grindstone
• Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.