ABSTRACT

Tiny Tim was a little ‘‘crippled’’ boy whose sweetness and courage and pathetic plight melted the heart of miserly Ebenezer Scrooge. Scrooge’s charity toward Tim secured his own redemption. Dickens’s A Christmas Carol was a Yuletide staple. Between 1901 and 2009, the entertainment industry produced 56 live-action and 15 animated movie and television versions. Many were available on video and were rerun on television each December.1 Book retailers sold illustrated volumes as a holiday gift.2 And each December it seemed that every theater in the U.S. staged the story as a play.3 Americans saw a lot of Tim.