The Merry Beggars
CV NEWS FEED // The Merry Beggars’ audio adaptation of Charles Dickens’ beloved novella A Christmas Carol reached the No. 1 spot in Apple’s Fiction Podcast category this year.
A press release from The Merry Beggars, which is Relevant Radio’s entertainment division, relates that the audiobook is broken up into 25 episodes and changes perspective from the novel to focus on the author himself as the storyteller.
Peter Atkinson, the founder and executive producer of The Merry Beggars, was inspired to produce the series by a childhood Advent calendar with abridged booklets of A Christmas Carol for each day.
Atkinson recently shared more about the project with CatholicVote.
CatholicVote: Can you tell our audience a little more about the mission of The Merry Beggars and how it came to be?
Most secular entertainment undermines faith and virtue, making it exhausting for Christian families to find trusted sources for family entertainment. Instead of flipping on a show or confidently handing their children a book, parents feel anxious about what messages or agendas will be in their children’s library books. The mission of The Merry Beggars is to provide exceptional family entertainment rooted in the Catholic faith so that families can build homes full of adventure, joy, and faith. Entertainment and stories should encourage you and light your children’s imaginations on fire, not undermine the sacrifice and hard work of raising your family.
We produce audio dramas that inspire families and give them a sense of hope, courage, and adventure. These range from the faith-filled stories of The Saints, telling the stories of men and women who gave everything to God — and changed our world as a result — to the mystery-adventure thriller of On the Night Train, an 1880s adventure set aboard the transcontinental train race. In everything we do, it’s our purpose to make Mom and Dad’s job just a bit easier by giving them a trusted resource for beautiful, exceptional, and wholesome entertainment. We currently provide an award-winning and free content library of hundreds of episodes, over 5,000 pages of produced scripts, and hundreds of stories to explore.
What inspired you to create an Advent series of audio dramas based on Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol?
I had grown up with an Advent Calendar of A Christmas Carol. It was a very abridged version of the story, split into 25 different booklets. My brothers and I used to fight over who could get the biggest booklet to read to the rest of the family. A very Christmas-y, brotherly tradition. So I grew up falling in love with that story and associating Christmas with Charles Dickens’ incredible story of redemption.
After The Merry Beggars merged with Relevant Radio, we were dreaming up what our first production should be for the Christmas season. I immediately thought it would be cool if we could adapt the Advent Calendar concept of A Christmas Carol into audio, creating the first-ever Audio Advent Calendar. I spent two weeks adapting the script, with the help of Buzz McLaughlin, and we cast local professional actors, turned a conference room into a makeshift recording studio, began sound designing the episodes, and the rest is history.
Are there any lessons from A Christmas Carol that you think are especially important for modern parents and children?
So much of our modern world is full of despair. We are experiencing loneliness at levels not seen before in human history. And it’s because we’re looking for happiness in all the wrong places.
In the modern world, we’re constantly taught that our happiness lies in material security. If only we have enough money, enough possessions, the right job, power, status etc,. then we’ll be happy. We believe that we’re not happy because we lack those things. But Charles Dickens’ shows just the opposite. It is in giving away our possessions, in detachment from material things, that we find joy. It is in serving our fellow man and woman that we discover the great breadth and depth of spirit that God calls us to. The modern world shrinks our spirit and makes us believe our salvation is in possessions and power. Our Christian faith shows us that we are destined for union with God Himself, through sacrificial love. What could be greater?
This contrast is shown so clearly by a character from A Christmas Carol: Mr. Fezziwig. When Scrooge visits his old working place, he is moved to tears by his old employer Fezziwig’s generosity. Fezziwig spends money on a massive party for his workers — complete with fiddlers, punch, music, dancing, food, and beyond. There is life and vivaciousness and joy, made possible by Fezziwig’s love for his employees and his generosity. Fezziwig is shown dancing with his wife — obviously still madly in love with her. Fezziwig’s spirit is free, magnanimous, and exuberant. In contrast, the elderly Ebenezer is shown earlier in A Christmas Carol as a miserly employer, unwilling to let Bob Cratchit have enough coal to warm himself by. His passion for money and gain has snuffed out the freedom that Fezziwig so evidently has. Fezziwig is my model for what a good Catholic life looks like — joyful, able to throw an incredible party, and filled with love and gratitude toward life.
When God questioned Cain about where Abel was, after Cain killed him, Cain responds: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Well, the true answer to that is “Yes!” We are our brother’s keeper. We are called to care for each other. We are called to care for the poor, tend to the sick, encourage the downtrodden. And the beauty of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is that Dickens shows that our happiness lies precisely in caring for each other, the weaker, the sickly, the less fortunate than us.
