Dickensian Dramas: Plays from Charles Dickens ed. by Jacky Bratton, and: Dickensian Dramas: Plays from Charles Dickens ed. by Jim Davis (review)

The text here includes weak punctuation and grammar, and many errors in diction and spelling: it’s difficult to determine what errors are Bratton’s, and what are irregularities in Stirling’s text, but the book prints “butter a the table” (113), “to” for “too” (118), and “inefficient” for “insufficient” (131). [...]Scrooge dismisses his visions as “only a dream” (224), and the famous closing line is transformed to “Heaven bless us every one!” (226). In her introduction to The Cricket on the Hearth, by Albert Smith, produced in December of 1845, Bratton claims that it was widely understood that Dickens’s Christmas books were now “concocted chiefly with a view to … production at the Lyceum” (327). Taylor makes some other surprising choices, revealing the background to Manette’s incarceration in the first scene, and eliminating the final dramatic scene of a prophetic Darnay, substituting instead Madame Defarge’s death on the last page, at repentant Defarge’s hands.