[...] I considered laying a more overt trail to the revelation of Smike's parenthood. The most emblematic feature of the adaptation wasn't my idea: the directors Trevor Nunn and John Caird felt (as I did) that a major part of Dickens's genius lay in his authorial voice, but that this shouldn't be expressed by a man in a beard reading out the narrative passages, but by the whole company, possessing the whole story, and telling it to us over the whole length of the adaptation. Paul Davis's insightful The Life and Times of Ebenezer Scrooge charts the history of how the Carol has been interpreted by critics and adaptors: in the 1840s as a reinvention of Christmas for urban Britain; in the 1870s as a religious allegory, with the Cratchits at its centre; in the 1900s, for the first time, as a children's story; in the 1920s and 1930s as an anti-capitalist polemic; in the 1950s as a work of Freudian analysis; and in the 1980s (on occasions) as the unfair denigration of a perfectly sound business model. To see Dickens reading the parliamentary report, being persuaded against writing a tract for Christmas, but then discovering how to express his outrage at injustice through a fable, was an enticing way of dramatising the process of creation, and demonstrating how the lessons of the three spirits lead on one to another: with Christmas Past, yes, as a Freudian psycho-analyst, convincing Scrooge of the need to pity and love himself; but with Christmas Present widening the lesson to embrace kindred and kind.