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A Christmas Carol
You may be looking for the television story.

A Christmas Carol was a book written by Charles Dickens. The story featured ghosts and confrontations with past, present and future.

"Now, it is a fact that there was nothing particular at all about the knocker on the door of this house, but let any man explain to me if he can, how it happened that Scrooge, having his key in the lock of the door, saw in the knocker, without its undergoing any intermediate process of change, not a knocker, but Marley's face. Marley's face! It looked at Scrooge as Marley used to look. It looked like..."
―An excerpt from A Christmas Carol as read by Charles Dickens. (TV: The Unquiet Dead)

Characters in A Christmas Carol included Scrooge (TV: The Unquiet Dead) and Jacob Marley. (PROSE: Bay of the Dead, TV: The Unquiet Dead) Tiny Tim was also a character in the book. He was, as Susan put it, a "young cripple". (PROSE: The Edge of Destruction)

The Twelfth Doctor noted that A Christmas Carol was a story which everyone knew. (PROSE: A History of Humankind)

In 1869, Dickens gave a reading from this story in Cardiff. It was interrupted by the Gelth-possessed corpse of Mrs Peace who, in life, had been a fan of the story. (TV: The Unquiet Dead) Posters for this reading were dotted around the city, and one remained outside the Torchwood hub thirty years later. (PROSE: The Baby Farmers)

Alternate timeline[]

In a world where all of history occurred at once because River Song refused to kill the Doctor, Charles Dickens gave some details about his "new Christmas special" on TV, at 5:02pm 22 April 2011, as that was always the time and date. He said that it would involve ghosts and the past, the present and future, all at the same time. (TV: The Wedding of River Song)

References[]

The Eleventh Doctor used the story as a basis for a plan to convince Kazran Sardick to save a crashing starliner. (TV: A Christmas Carol)

The Tenth Doctor compared his past and future incarnations "getting dumped on [his] head" while tracking Zygons in Elizabethan England to the story, commenting "Very Christmas Carol". (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor)

Behind the scenes[]

  • One idea for the first two stories of Doctor Who was a take on a Christmas Carol, with the ghost of Jacob Marley really being the Doctor, only slightly tipsy. [1]

Connections in screen adaptations[]

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