My interest in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol began one Christmas eve when, as a small child, my parents turned on network radio to listen to what, even then, had become a classic Christmas eve festivity: Lionel Barrymore's presentation of the Dickens story.

Radio was a medium that required the imagination to paint scenes far more colorful, and to concoct monsters far scarier, than anything motion pictures or television have ever been able to present. With radio, the listener was the stage designer, costumer, and location director.

In later years, I watched Alistair Sim's movie version of the story – the best of all the movie treatments, in my view. The film's special effects portrayal of Marley was nowhere as hideous and frightening as the one I had created in my mind while listening to the radio. Listening to Marley's chains being dragged up a darkened staircase elicited a stark terror that far exceeded the scene I saw in the movie.

As I became older, I decided that Mr. Dickens had given Ebenezer Scrooge an undeserved reputation for villainy, placing him in such company as Uriah Heep, Iago, Dr. Moriarty, or Snidely Whiplash, to name but a few. It is my purpose, in making this holiday defense of my client, to present to you a different interpretation of the story, that you will see the villainy not in my client's character, but in Charles Dickens' miscasting of the true heroes of the time of which he wrote, namely, the industrialists and financiers who created that most liberating epoch in human history: the industrial revolution.

Lest there be any readers who need reminding of the virtues of this period, let me quote from that eminent English historian, T.S. Ashton, who wrote of the impoverished conditions of England and other nations prior to the industrial revolution. As he expressed it, "[t]he central problem of the age was how to feed and clothe and employ generations of children outnumbering by far those of any earlier time." England, he went on, "was delivered, not by her rulers, but by those who, seeking no doubt their own narrow ends, had the wit and resources to devise new instruments of production and new methods of administering industry. There are today on the plains of India and China men and women, plague-ridden and hungry, living lives little better, to outward appearance, than those of the cattle that toil with them by day and share their places of sleep by night. Such Asiatic standards, and such unmechanized horrors, are the lot of those who increase their numbers without passing through an industrial revolution."

It is out of profound respect for those whose pursuits of their selfish interests have done far more to better the lives of others than have the combined efforts of all the self-styled altruists, saints, social workers, politicians, and other mischievous beings, that I have undertaken this defense of one of the most maligned financiers of this humanizing epoch. As you read my defense of Scrooge, and make a comparative judgment of my client and his accuser, Charles Dickens, I ask you to keep in mind the warnings of another 19th-century writer, Anatole France, who observed: "Those who have given themselves the most concern about the happiness of peoples have made their neighbours very miserable."

May it please the Court. . . and frankly, even if it doesn't please the Court.

I find myself, once again, in the company of people like Clarence Darrow, who observed that "there are those who run with the hunters, and those who run with the hunted." In representing my client, Ebenezer Scrooge, I am running with the hunted.