Book Review: David T. Warner’s ‘God Bless Us, Every One!: The Story Behind a Christmas Carol’

“God Bless Us, Every One!: The Story Behind a Christmas Carol” by David T. Warner

Illustrated by Brandon Doman.

Shadow Mountain, 2014. 32 pages. Hardcover.

One of the best things that has come out of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s annual Christmas show is a book of the story that goes with each year’s performance. Each book is a short, easy read for the Christmas holidays and wonderfully illustrated in oils, watercolors, or photographs.

For the 2014 offering, we get the story behind “A Christmas Carol,” Charles Dickens’s immortal holiday tale that many say actually invented the modern Christmas.

In the autumn of 1843, despite being England’s most popular and celebrated author, Dickens was almost broke. There were the costs of maintaining a public image and the family hangers-on who constantly asked for money, such as his brother. His wife was expecting their fifth child, and sales from his most recent book were down. His publisher was threatening to cut off his weekly advances.

Dickens was desperate.

The memory of going to debtors’ prison with his father as a child haunted him. He started walking the London streets at night, going over in his mind time after time what he could to do earn the money his family needed and keep from repeating his father’s experience.
Eventually an idea grew in his mind, the seed which would give birth to Dickens’s most famous work and one of the most filmed books ever.

At this point, the story behind “A Christmas Carol” is factual. From here, Warner borrows from Scrooge’s encounter with the ghosts of Christmas, and Dickens meets the Ghost of Christmas Present.

It’s a delightful romp across London and England as Dickens himself is reminded of what he has forgotten about Christmas in his worries about the family fiances, much in the same way Scrooge was taught again the joys of Christmas.

As he wrote the book, he obsessed over it. He wrote to a friend, “I was reluctant to lay the manuscript aside even for a moment. I wept and laughed and wept again. The spirit of the story captured more than my mind. It took hold of my heart and taught me what I did not know, in a most extraordinary way.”

Dickens eventually did recover financially and avoided debtor’s prison, although it took a while. (That’s another story in and of itself.) When he died, a child was heard to say, “Mister Dickens is dead? Then will Father Christmas die too?”

This is a wonderful book that can be read to children young and old. But even better is that it comes with a DVD of the acclaimed Welsh actor John-Rhys Davies, of the Indiana Jones movies and the Lord of the Ring trilogy, giving a wonderful rendition of the story complete with flying across the city of London with Dickens. Davies’s delightfully rich voice and Welsh brogue are the perfect complement to the story behind “A Christmas Carol.”

Dickens’s own feelings on Christmas are summed up in the words of Scrooge’s nephew, Fred:

I highly recommend this for Christmas relaxing, for children of all ages, and renewing your Christmas spirit. From Tiny Tim, in Dickens’s own immortal words, “God bless us, everyone!”