»A Christmas Carol / skaiter

Lamely having put off reading any of Dickens's work in high school, I finally paged through The Mystery of Edwin Drood a few years ago, and, in the spirit of the season picked up A Christmas Carol at the library.
I somehow avoided Dickens entirely as part of the curriculum, although the free period I mysteriously enjoyed my first year — I probably should have been taking an elective, or a hard science, or something structured — when I felt a twinge of guilt at my ignorance of this part of the canon, I decided to buy a complete set of his works, illustrated, from Oxford. Their lovely edition sold out, however (I did see it on the shelf of a beautiful but out-of-place house for sale in San Francisco some years ago) before the publisher fulfilled my order, and I have used this as an excuse since.

A Christmas Carol in particular perplexed me with its use of skaiter, in the sentence "You are not a skaiter, are you?" and with a reference to Ebenezer Scrooge making a "pefect Laocoön of himself with his stockings", which I presume is not a suggestion of the protagonist's sexual impropriety.

Otherwise: Bah! Humbug!

Were it not for its lofty place in literature, I would wonder. All the same, in fact, I wonder: this story has all the depth and tension of a holiday card; I would call it kitsch, but the introduction to this edition suggests that Dickens was quite serious in his presentation of the Spirits to Scrooge. I think I prefer the various staged or televised performances to the book itself, which did not pull me in to the story at all. Scrooge was all-too-easily convinced of the moral error of his way, and his reform --- well, let me not be cynical. Dickens himself anticipated some of my reaction, noting in the story that Scrooge's transformation was complete and abrupt, but, well, that's the way the story goes. I think that I will return to edgier novels, now.