CHARLES DICKENS

A new biography argues that the year 1851 marked an artistic renewal for the author.

Sally Ann Howes, who played as a child actor before she later starred in the 1968 film “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” with Dick Van Dyke, has died.

London has honored American Jim Henson, the creator of the Muppets, with a blue plaque outside his former home in the British capital.

Frantz and Jamie Arty didn’t know what kind of history they would uncover when they started restoring an early 19th-century mansion on Long Island.

(Aaron Chown/PA via AP)LONDON – When Andrew Lincoln steps onstage at London’s Old Vic Theatre as Ebenezer Scrooge in “A Christmas Carol,” he looks out on an empty auditorium. The Old Vic is among theaters trying to keep the flame alive. That includes London, where theaters had just begun to reopen after a four-week national lockdown ended Dec. 2. The Old Vic has mounted an “In Camera” season of plays performed on its stage and broadcast online. Playwright Jack Thorne’s adaptation has been a hit at the Old Vic for the past three Christmases.

The first commercially printed Christmas card is up for sale — a merry Victorian-era scene that scandalized some who denounced it as humbug when it first appeared in 1843. “A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to You,” it reads. That didn't sit well at the time with the puritanical Temperance Society, which kicked up such a fuss it took three years before another Christmas card was produced. “They were quite distressed that in this ‘scandalous’ picture they had children toasting with a glass of wine along with the adults. It's believed to have gone on sale in the same week in December 1843 that Charles Dickens' “A Christmas Carol” first was published.

LONDON – Scottish writer Douglas Stuart won the Booker Prize for fiction Thursday for “Shuggie Bain,” the story of a boy’s turbulent coming of age in hardscrabble 1980s Glasgow. Stuart, 44, won the prestigious 50,000 pound ($66,000) award for his first published novel, the product of a decade of work. Stuart dedicated the book to own mother, who died when he was 16. Though there have been many British winners of the Booker Prize, most of them English, Stuart is the first Scottish victor since James Kelman took the 1994 prize with “How Late it Was, How Late” — a book Stuart has called an inspiration. Mantel won the Booker for both its predecessors, “Wolf Hall” and “Bring up the Bodies,” and had been widely tipped for the hat trick.

FILE - Jefferson Mays arrives at the "I Am the Night" FYC event in Los Angeles on May 9, 2019. (Photo by Willy Sanjuan/Invision/AP, File)NEW YORK – What does the theater community desperately need during a time of social distancing? Tickets purchased via the show's website will automatically benefit local community theaters based on the ZIP code the user enters. It was his introduction to the theater, and he and his family would read it every year. “They need help now.”Partner theaters include Actors’ Playhouse, Geffen Playhouse, George Street Playhouse, La Jolla Playhouse, Sankofa Collective, South Coast Repertory, Springfield Contemporary Theatre, Theatre Tallahassee, and Vermont Stage.

With all due respect to Charles Dickens, this is a tale of how two cities handled a health crisis via social distancing, with opposite results. Days later, hospitals in the area were filled with patients suffering or dying from the Spanish flu. On the other side of the ledger, things were way different in St. Louis. After detecting its first cases of the Spanish flu in the community, St. Louis closed buildings such as schools, churches, courtrooms and libraries. The Spanish flu was nothing to mess around with, since ultimately, an estimated 20 to 50 million people died after contracting the virus.