Ebenezer Scrooge named most popular Dickens character

Penguin Books poll to mark 200th anniversary of author’s birth reveals miser from A Christmas Carol as best loved.

Alistair Sim as Scrooge from the 1951 film based on A Christmas Carol. In poll to mark the author's 200th anniversary, the miser has been voted the UK's favourite Charles Dickens character. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

By Sam Jones

A cold-hearted miser bullied by ghosts into gaining a conscience has triumphed over a festering, jilted bride and an alcoholic, nihilistic barrister – not to mention the odd pickpocket and escaped convict – to be named the most popular Charles Dickens character.

Ebenezer Scrooge saw off many of the writer’s best known and loved creations, including Miss Havisham, Sydney Carton, the Artful Dodger, Fagin, Nancy and Magwitch, in a Penguin Books poll commissioned to mark the 200th anniversary this week of Dickens’s birth.

The top 10 is light on unadulterated goodness, with only Pip and Joe Gargery from Great Expectations and Betsey Trotwood from David Copperfield representing the kinder faces among the Dickensian ranks.

And although the list is heavily slanted towards Great Expectations and Oliver Twist, Oliver himself was left wanting more votes at No 11.

Claire Tomalin, whose highly acclaimed biography of Dickens was published last year, said that Scrooge’s popularity was surprising given that his 21st-century equivalent might be a banker.

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Cheap classics boom as rest of book trade struggles

Robert Redford in the 1974 film of The Great Gatsby. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

While recession bites elsewhere, sales of Wordsworth Editions’ £1.99 classics have surged.

By Alison Flood

As the winds of recession sweep across the UK, a story of the decadent rich in New York has beaten the gloom, with a £1.99 edition of The Great Gatsby selling 232% more than last year.

Elsewhere, publishers are feeling the squeeze, with spending on printed novels down 10%, or £35m, on 2010. But sales in cheap classics are booming, with Wordsworth Editions, which publishes around 200 works of classic fiction for £1.99 apiece, up 10.9% so far this year, with its fiction in particular surging by 18%.

“I think the big reason has to be recessionary,” said Philip Stone, charts editor of the Bookseller. “Publishers of more expensive classics such as Penguin, Oxford University Press and Oneworld haven’t enjoyed that kind of growth from their classics this year.”

Stone pointed to the £1.99 Wordsworth edition of The Great Gatsby, up by 232% year-on-year to 11,550 copies sold, and to the £1.99 Wordsworth edition of Jane Eyre, up by 59.5% year-on-year. Penguin’s £7.99 edition of the F Scott Fitzgerald classic saw sales growth of 15.4% to 3,328 copies in comparison, according to book sales monitor Nielsen BookScan.

Derek Wright, director at Wordsworth, said the publisher’s overall sales have doubled over the last five years to reach £1.3m in the year to end-May 2011, and are on course to be “even better” this year, already at almost £900,000 in the six months since.

“Historically, our classics thrive in recessions. The £1 classic paperback came out in 1992 when the country was in its third year of recession. This was long before I worked for Wordsworth, and I can remember it well, because suddenly there were these big displays in the high-street chains like John Menzies, and I bought them by the dozen,” he said.

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Songs from Clockwork Orange musical to make UK debut

Previously unheard showtunes composed by author Anthony Burgess are said to recall West Side Story.

By Sean Michaels

The droogs don't work ... Still from A Clockwork Orange (1971). Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

Songs from a musical adaptation of A Clockwork Orange are to be performed for the first time next year. Written by author Anthony Burgess, the ultraviolent showtunes will premiere in Manchester next summer.

Burgess, who died in 1993, started working on a stage version of A Clockwork Orange a decade after Stanley Kubrick’s controversial 1971 film adaptation. “The reason why Burgess wanted to make his own stage adaptation, quite a long time after Kubrick made the film, was to assert his ownership of the story,” Dr Andrew Biswell, director of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, told BBC News. Although the Royal Shakespeare Company premiered a production based on Burgess’s script in 1990, his songs were replaced with compositions by U2′s Bono and The Edge.

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