Changes

Because Dickens is still right. A Christmas Carol is still relevant - perhaps as much now as at any time since. Ignorance and Want remain the prime movers behind so many of the worlds world's ills. Want is perhaps an obvious one, but Dickens rightly points to Ignorance as being the most dangerous.

Ignorance goes both ways of course. Dickens was a huge advocate of education for the poor and needy and a vigorous campaigner for public libraries (he would be appalled to see them under threat in this supposedly enlightened age), but he was also talking to his middle -class readers about their ignorance - their selfish ignorance of the plight of the many for whom London was a living hell.

In ''The Last of the Spirits'' I have tried to give some flesh to those two children. They are supernatural in A Christmas Carol, but I imagine them being real. I have given them names - Sam and Lizzie - and a backstory that involves, like Dickens own life story, the loss of their father to the debtors ' prison. I have them get caught up in the same magic that takes Scrooge on his life-changing journey through time.