Never.

Now Dickens used this rare Christmas treasure here in New York at Christmastime in two performances in 1867. The first performance was at a Steinway piano display hall on East 14th Street and the second at a church in Brooklyn. People lined up in the snow for tickets. Some even slept outside for a spot in the crowd. And the queue by opening time was a mile long... Now the way that Dickens liked to prepare for one of his readings was to drink two tablespoons of rum mixed with cream for breakfast, a pint of champagne for tea, and half an hour before he went on stage he would knock back a sherry with a raw egg beaten into it."

To hear Gaiman recite A Christmas Carol with the annotations Dickens himself used, listen to the rest of this special holiday podcast episode. As the Ghost of Christmas Present might say, you have never seen the like of Gaiman's Dickens rendition before. 

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