A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

I'm a sucker for redemption stories, so naturally I love the tale of Ebenezer Scrooge, the best Alma 36 story since Alma 36.  But why read A Christmas Carol when the plot is so familiar from all the different movies, plays, and other adaptations?  For the language.  What bauhaus has done to our architecture, modern writing has done to our language.  Yes, its more effective and utilitarian.  But we've lost something baroque and beautiful in the process.  Here is Dickens describing a marketplace:

"The poulterers' shops were still half open, and the fruiterers' were radiant in their glory.  There were great, round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of jolly old gentlemen, lolling at the doors, and tumbling out into the the street in their apoplectic opulence.  There were ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish Onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish Friars, and winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe."

Metaphor, simile, personification, chain-adjectives, alliteration ("apoplectic opulence")!  When did we stop writing like this?  When did we forget the feats our language could perform?  So sad.  So grateful we will always still have Dickens.