Huffpost Books   Lev Raphael Headshot  Does A Christmas Carol
Really Need to be Rescued?  Posted: Updated:   No, the real
danger is poor, dead Dickens himself. Journalist Jesse Kornbluth
has published a version of Dickens' novella that's been cut by
half. Why? He claims Dickens' writing is dated, clotted,
overwrought. That last label is the funniest of the three
because a story about a notorious miser visited by four ghosts
who scare the hell out of him to make him change his life is by
definition overwrought.  Kornbluth thinks classics like this
Dickens tale won't survive in our short attention span age, and
that his version is an improvement. Well, the proof is in the
Christmas pudding, right? Let's compare part of the bravura
description of Scrooge's cheapness and lack of humanity from the
opening pages to what Kornbluth has boiled it down to.  Here's
the original:    And now the rewrite:  For Scrooge was the
cheapest of the cheap, so tight-fisted that if the coins in his
hand could talk, they would scream