A Christmas Carol was first staged in the first month of the new year of 1844; by mid February at least eight performances had appeared. Those several from the script by Charles Webb soon rivalled the Adelphi version that the inevitable Stirling [a prolific adapter of Dickens's works] had created -- this time with Dickens's permission. Stirling's play ran a respectable but not spectacular number of performances -- over forty. . . .
In the Adelphi production of Stirling's drama, O. [a shortened form of his nickname, "Obie," a western villain he had once enacted on stage with great success] Smith, who also played such monstrous parts as that of the animated body in stagings of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, impersonated Scrooge, and one early reviewer found that his acting "was throughout, admirable." (H. Philip Bolton, Dickens Dramatized, Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987, page 234)
[To text of Edward Stirling's A Christmas Carol]
Last modified 30 April 2003