Every day of the holiday season, there is probably someone in your neighborhood watching or reading some version of A Christmas Carol. If you think about it, that means we probably see early Victorian England as often as any other time period. What has kept the story so vital? And how did a young Charles Dickens engender so much empathy for such a miserable man? This is a remastered 2nd edition of Iconography episode 3, with additional bonus content created in December 2021. To hear the original 1st edition, produced and published in December 2016, visit https://iconographypodcast.com/articles/ebenezer-scrooge-original-edition-s1!47ae0
Every day of the holiday season, there is probably someone in your neighborhood watching or reading some version of A Christmas Carol. If you think about it, that means we probably see early Victorian England as often as any other time period. What has kept the story so vital? And how did a young Charles Dickens engender so much empathy for such a miserable man?
This is a remastered 2nd edition of Iconography episode 3, with additional bonus content created in December 2021. To hear the original 1st edition, produced and published in December 2016, go here.
(Hub & Spoke Sonic ID)
Charles Gustine (Host): Hi there. For Iconography’s fifth anniversary we’re remastering episodes from season one, when we were looking at the icons of England, producing them to a higher standard than I had the means to get them to when I was living in London back in 2016. This is a remastered 2nd edition of Iconography’s first Christmas episode, titled Ebenezer Scrooge, from December 2016 – you can still find a link to the original 1st edition of this episode in the episode notes and at iconographypodcast.com. I hope you enjoy this seasonally appropriate dive into Dickens, and be sure to stick around until the end for an afterward with some new insights on recent A Christmas Carol adaptations that I hadn’t had the chance to see in 2016. Without further ado, here’s the 2nd edition of Iconography episode 3, Ebenezer Scrooge.
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Announcer (at Prince Charles cinema): Ladies and gentlemen, if you're here for a Muppet Christmas Carol, please collect your tickets first and then join the queue outside.
Carolyn Gustine (at Prince Charles Cinema): Are you ready for Gonzo, Fozzie Bear?
Charles Gustine (at Prince Charles Cinema): Their correct names are Charles Dickens and Fozziwig. You've got to call them by their formal English names.
Carolyn (at Prince Charles Cinema): It's going to be awesome.
Charles Gustine (Host): Carolyn, has informed me that this will be - must be - a yearly Christmas tradition for our family. Not seeing Muppet Christmas Carol at the Prince Charles Cinema in London, necessarily, but Muppet Christmas Carol for sure. Or else...
Carolyn (at Prince Charles Cinema): It's the best movie in the whole world.
Charles (Host): So that got me thinking. So there's a major film or television adaptation of A Christmas Carol once every four years or so on average, and at least four of those adaptations are traditional fare in enough houses that you could consider them stone cold Christmas classics: the 1951 version starring Alastair Sim, The Muppets version (of course), the Mickey version, and the Bill Murray modernization Scrooged. And then there's the 1970 musical Scrooge, and the versions starring George C. Scott and Patrick Stewart, and these likely have enough adherents to form sizable coalitions of their own. The Jim Carrey motion capture film is one of the top 10 grossing Christmas films of all time, so it's probably on a lot of DVD shelves - which I'm fine with because it's actually a really good adaptation when it's not a CGI rollercoaster.
Charles (Host): Fun facts. The first Christmas movie was a 1901 silent film adaptation of A Christmas Carol. The first animated Christmas special, the one that inspired Rudolph and Charlie Brown, was Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol. Politics fact: When the United Nations got worried about the U.S. backing out, it had Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling write an intriguingly bad modernization, A Carol for Another Christmas, in which surly, isolationist Daniel Grudge learns that everyone's problems are America's problems.
Charles (Host): We're not even getting abstract here, guys, arguing that pretty much every secular Christmas movie is sort of a loose adaptation of A Christmas Carol, that the greatest Christmas film of all time is a genius inversion of Dickens decrial of the selfish elite.
Jimmy Stewart (It's a Wonderful Life clip): Merry Christmas you wonderful old Building and Loan!
Charles (Host): We don't need it. Even without it, some version of Scrooge is croaking out "bah humbug" in some house on our street every day of the holiday season. Which means if you think about it, outside of World War Two, there may be no time period we see depicted as often as early Victorian England. Thanks to Ebenezer Scrooge, we have a yearly appointment with the snow covered streets of the city of London, a freezing counting house where a clerk shivers, a nephew keeps his Christmas cheer, and those two solicitors take hilariously long to get that Scrooge is not going to give them any money.
(Iconography Theme music)
Charles (Host): Come in and know me better, man. I am the podcaster of Christmas present. Charles Gustine and this is Iconography, a podcast dedicated to the geography of icons real and imagined. This week we're leaning pretty heavily into the imagined. At the outset of this project, I said that dreamed up places...
Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone clip): Platform 9 and 3/4...
Charles (Host): And dreamed up people...
Alan Rickman (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone clip): Mr. Potter...
Charles (Host): And dreamed up things were just as iconic and just as important to forming the picture we have of a place, and the picture that place has of itself, as the features you can see on a skyline. Seeing a picture of Big Ben calls up some immediate associations with Britishness, to be sure. But seeing a lightning shaped scar and some glasses or a lonely crutch resting on an empty stool calls up a whole universe of associations. And these associations are of an imaginary Britain, OK. But for many people, the imaginary Britain is the realest Britain they're ever going to get. Many might prefer it. Many British people might prefer it to the real Britain because reality involves traffic, harsh economic realities and campaign ads, and it doesn't involve magic wands or sonic screwdrivers.
Charles (Host): A Christmas Carol is especially durable in this regard because, as its title suggests, it's bound to come up at least once a year as fodder for all sorts of media. Sitcoms, comic books, your local playhouse... On SNL, it can come up in shorthand, and we all get it.
Alec Baldwin (Saturday Night Live clip): What's that sound? Is it a ghost? Am I being Scrooged? I hate that. Scrooged!
Charles (Host): And because its definitive version predates television, video games, film, comics, A Christmas Carol can be adapted over and over again without being called a remake like an adaptation of It's A Wonderful Life or The Grinch would. A Christmas Carol has always been adapted - there were pirate versions popping up in theaters pretty much as soon as people had read the thing - and it will always be adapted. Because of this, a Christmas Carol is as essential today as it was in 1843. Probably more so. It's likely that two hundred years from now, we will still be having it fed to us through our story intake tubes every Christmas time, which by that point will probably be every day but April 27th through May 15th. What keeps it so vital?
Narrator and Bill Murray (Scrooged clip): Acid rain. Drug addiction. International terrorism. Freeway killers. More than ever, it is important to remember the true meaning of Christmas. Don't miss Charles Dickens immortal classic Scrooge. Your Like might just depend on it.
Charles (Host): All right, you got me. That's not a real promo for a real adaptation of A Christmas Carol. That's Frank Cross's promo for his adaptation of A Christmas Carol in the 1988 Bill Murray film Scrooged.
Bill Murray (Scooged clip): Not bad, huh?
Charles (Host): But it does scratch an uncomfortable itch when it comes to Christmas comfort food. During Christmas, we escape what is happening now, and we crawl into this carefully constructed simulacra of the past. It's a little bit manger, a little bit North Pole... And some Olde England and our dreams of a white Christmas and of course, our favorite family holiday traditions that have been handed down to us.
Charles (Host): Christmas is the only time of year when we make it a point to go back and visit the same songs, the same movies, the same books. Every other time of year, we're looking for new experiences: that new jam, the big blockbuster, the buzzy show. But in December, we're more than happy to climb back into a cocoon of beloved experiences. A Charlie Brown Christmas. Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole. Claymation. God bless us every one.
Charles (Host): "But there aren't any good new Christmas movies, and the Christmas specials today suck, and there hasn't been a great Christmas single since All I Want for Christmas Is You, which came out in like the mid-90s and sounds like the mid-60s."
Charles (Host): I hear you. I do. But it's not for lack of trying. There are still new Christmas specials and Christmas albums and Christmas movies, but let's use "new" with some reservations. The singer may be different, but the songs are usually the same. The messages are familiar. We want them that way. The Christmas film, the Christmas special and the Christmas song aren't so much dead as undead. They find success occasionally in the 21st century, but usually by harkening back to a time when Christmas entertainment had a rosy glow on its cheek. Or at least we perceived it as such. We know what a nativity story should look and sound like: cute kids in ill fitting shepherd costumes flubbing their lines adorably. And we know what carolers should look and sound like - top hats and bonnets please and do not stray from the standards. And we know what Christmas pop music should sound like - like the day after VE Day with sleigh bells. These things are frozen in amber. As Christmas has grown as an institution into an entire holiday season, the idea of it as a cultural institution has stagnated because the more Christmas permeates our lives, the more we know what Christmas should feel like. Because commercials and movies told us what it should be like.
Hallmark commercial clip: From Hallmark, a wish that all our families can be together this Christmas.
Charles (Host): There are four golden days of Christmas. The first Christmas when a king was born in Bethlehem. Any Christmas when Victoria was queen. Some 1940s Christmas when Bing Crosby was duetting with Nat King Cole and all the kid could want was a Red Ryder B.B. Gun. And, of course, the Christmas when you were eight and you got that one.... oh my gosh, do you remember how excited you were when you opened that?
Charles (Host): I come here not to criticize, but to classify. Gathering around every year to watch a Muppet Christmas Carol may be a family's most cherished yearly ritual. It's beautiful. But it's also a bit meta, right? Because it harkens back to the Christmas that tradition started, when parents first shared Fozziewig with their children. But it also harkens back to a time when Muppets were at the center of culture. And then, beyond that, it harkens back to Dickens' time, to snowy London streets, where street urchins sing carols. There's this great story in Pete Brown's history of the George Inn, Shakespeare's Local, where a bunch of people in frock coats and gingham dresses have a lavish dinner party in the George Inn. They wassail and they snapdragon, which is like bobbing for apples except there's alcohol and an open flame. Carolers carol outside. It's 1936, The Times actually makes fun of these revelers, the Dickens society.
Charles (Host): "Perhaps the guests were thankful for the facilities provided by London Transport to take them on from a world of make believe and sentiment to the realities of Christmas present."
Charles (Host): Brown does a great job in his book of characterizing the sudden rise of nostalgia as we know it today, as it rose up in the years after World War One with its machine guns and mustard gas. Not nostalgia as a melancholy for home that's considered an actual illness, but nostalgia as an ache for the way things used to be. Even if you never actually experienced those things personally.
Charles (Host): At the heart of this ache is Charles Dickens, by far the most popular writer in England and America in the 1920s and 30s, despite his being very much not alive anymore. And to get even more nostalgia-ception, there's nostalgia within Dickens text - for Fezziwig's rocking party - but there's also nostalgia without. Dickens has plenty of political reasons to tell his Christmas Carol, and we'll get to those. But really, he's just a guy dreaming of a white Christmas, just like the ones he used to know.
Charles (Host): "There is nothing in England that exercises a more delightful spell over my imagination than the lingerings of the holiday customs and rural games of former times. They recall the pictures my fancy used to draw in the May morning of life, when as yet I only knew the world through books, and believed it to be all that poets had painted it. And they bring with them the flavor of those honest days of yore in which, perhaps with equal fallacy, I am apt to think the world was more home bred, social and joyous than at present. I regret to say they are daily growing more and more faint, being gradually worn away by time, but still more obliterated by modern fashion."
Charles (Host): That may sound like a dispatch from the front lines of today's War on Christmas, but in fact, that's Washington Irving, the proud papa of American literature, of whom Dickens was a massive fan. And he's waxing rhapsodic about his time in England, in the eighteen-teens. Around that time, which is actually the time of Dickens birth, antiquarians began seriously lamenting the loss of Christmas as a grand civic celebration, and there was a movement to reclaim the traditions of old. Some of these traditions were completely made up or misinterpreted, and some never caught on, and some still define our Christmas today. A seminal text in this movement was Thomas K. Hervey's 1836 The Book of Christmas, which was a guide to reclaiming Christmas.
Charles (Host): "To enable our readers to do this with due effect, we will endeavor to furnish them with a program of some of the more important ceremonies observed by our hearty ancestors on the occasion, and to give them some explanation of those observances which linger still, although the causes in which their institution originated are becoming gradually obliterated, and although they themselves are falling into a neglect which augurs too plainly of their final and speedy extinction. It is alas but too true that the spirit of hearty festivity in which our ancestors met this season has been long on the decline, and much of the joyous pomp with which it was once received has long since passed away, gradually disappeared before the philosophic pretensions and chilling pedantry of these sage and self-seeking days. From a period of high ceremonial and public celebration, which it long continued to be in England, the Christmastide has tamed away into a period of domestic union and social festivity."
Charles (Host): Dude, don't sound so bummed! Hervey makes domestic union and social festivity sound awful. Christmas hadn't died. It had found a home in the home. Homes like Bob Cratchit's, where the best dinner of the year was had and toasts were made and yeah, chestnuts were roasted on an open fire. People still celebrated Christmas in whatever way made their family and friends happiest. You could say that meant that Christmas had gone into hiding. I think it's more that it had become destandardized. Since Oliver Cromwell's government had banned it two hundred years prior, even after Charles II had restored it along with restoring the monarchy, the holiday had lost its gravitational center and its orbit had become increasingly erratic. So, no, Dickens didn't invent Christmas, he didn't really even popularize it after years of decay, but he did do something critical. He provided it with an extremely popular, an unprecedentedly popular, template for how Christmas should feel and how it shouldn't feel. It shouldn't feel lonely. It should feel generous. It should feel reflective, nostalgic even (though he wouldn't have used that word). And cold. Very, very cold. In his biography of Charles Dickens, Simon Callow says:
Charles (Host): "He was consciously reviving an early, more personal sort of Christmas. The very snowiness he immortalizes was not an early Victorian phenomenon - the 30s and 40s had seen a series of particularly mild winters - but a deep and passionate reversion to the Christmases of his own childhood. It was the measure of his genius and the power of his relationship with his readers that he forged all these disparate elements into one overwhelming symbol, making Christmas the point of intersection of the whole life of society, at which a huge effort of benevolence, of generosity, and of integration could be harnessed to heal the running wound at the heart of his own times."
Charles (Host): So what keeps Scrooge so vital? Well, you could say the fact that we keep reusing him. You could say that his incredible endurance as an icon comes down to the fact that we keep putting him or characters acting in his stead through the same paces over and over again. Introduction, Ghost one, Ghost two, Ghost three, Conclusion. That this all goes far beyond anything Dickens could have imagined. Of course it does. But I think so much of what makes Scrooge so incredible and indelible is right there in the man that wrote him. So let's put aside the death of the author for just a bit. And bring the author back to life.
Jim Carrey (Disney's A Christmas Carol clip): I am the Ghost of Christmas Past. Long past? Your past. Rise and walk with me.
Charles (Host): At the Charles Dickens Museum in Holborn, there's a mirror. Now, while Dickens was quite a meticulous dresser, foppish a dandy even, that's not why this mirror is significant. This mirror was a storytelling portal. Like a Disney animator, like the folks who brought Scrooge McDuck and Mickey Mouse to life in their 1983 adaptation of Dickens' A Christmas Carol, Charles would sit in front of a big mirror to get into character. Long before he toured Britain and America, giving public readings of his work, he would sit in front of his mirror, and he'd make faces and he'd do voices for his own benefit. He'd hunch over and scowl as he invented Ebenezer Scrooge, and then he'd puff out his chest and belly laugh as he invented the ghost of Christmas present. He'd become kind little Bob Cratchit and weep when tiny Tim's loss became his loss. "My little little child, my little child." Pause.
Charles (Host): What is the face staring back at you in the mirror? What does it look like? What are its contours and its lines? Who is Charles Dickens in 1843, during the six weeks (yeah, six weeks) that he's writing a Christmas Carol? Well, I won't blame you if all you've got this.
Muppet Christmas Carol clip: My name is Charles Dickens. And my name is Rizzo the Rat. Hey, wait a second. You're not Charles Dickens. I am too! No, a blue furry Charles Dickens who hangs out like a rat?
Charles (Host): A furry alien? I think we established he was an alien, right? If you do have a mental image of the real Dickens, it's probably the Charles Dickens that Simon Callow plays in Christopher Ecclestone's third Doctor Who episode.
Doctor Who clip: Charles Dickens. You're brilliant you are, completely 100 percent brilliant. I've read them all, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist. And what's the other one, the one with the ghosts? Christmas Carol? No, no, no, no, the one with the trains, The Signalman. That's it. Terrifying. The best short story ever written. You're a genius! You want me to got rid of him, sir? No, I think he can stay.
Charles (Host): The Charles Dickens of photographs, most of which show a man in his late 40s or 50s with deep canyons below his eyes and with hair that's in full retreat from the forehead, but that's got a lot going on around both ears. Oh, and of course, there's the absolutely legendary goatee, the kind of goatee that Hells Angels want for Christmas. Even his earliest photographs from 1849 give an honest account of a man approaching middle age, clean shaven but nearing 40. We like photographs because they don't lie, or they don't lie as much as portraits and sketches. At least they don't go out of their way to flatter. Most Dickens photos don't flatter. They show a man who died at 58, looking 78. But paintings and sketches of young Charles definitely do flatter, as do contemporary descriptions of him.
Charles (Host): "He is young and handsome, has a mellow, beautiful eye, fine brow and abundant hair. His mouth is large and his smile so bright it seemed to shed light and happiness all about him."
Charles (Host): In depictions from 1843, Dickens looks like a freshman theatre major with the college freshman's mane of hair that says, "Mom's not making me cut my hair anymore." (I had one.) He has Fabio hair and his eyes are beautiful, dreamy giant, heavy-lidded. He looks like Beast from Disney's Beauty and the Beast when he's not all furry. Which is funny because Dan Stevens, who is playing Beast in 2017’s live action Beauty and the Beast remake, is also appearing as Christmas Carol period Dickens in a 2017 film called The Man Who Invented Christmas. But really, he looks more like Beast in the portrait of him before he got transformed, when he was a kid. Charles is just 31 and doesn't look it. Thirty one is impossibly young as it is - he's just a bit past the cutoff for the Victorian ages 30 under 30 list if such a thing had existed. But don't worry, he's definitely already made the hypothetical list twice, once for Pickwick Papers and once for Oliver Twist. And he probably made it under the pen name Boz back when he was 23 or 24 as well. Rest assured, Charles could disappear from the Earth at 31 - before David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Hard Times, A Tale of Two Cities - he could disappear and his legacy would already be set not merely as a rising star, but as one of the most important authors of his time and of all time. As a defining voice of Britain. That's the man in the mirror, a young man who wants to be an actor, to run a theater, to edit a weekly periodical, if not a daily periodical, and to perfect conjuring tricks and hypnotism, all while writing installments of Martin Chuzzlewit and the whole of a Christmas Carol simultaneously. To get inspiration, he takes vigorous walks through London on the daily. He describes his writing process for Carol as such.
Charles (Host): "Charles Dickens wept, and laughed, and wept again, and excited himself in the most extraordinary manner in the composition and thinking whereof, he walked about the black streets of London 15, 20 miles many a night when all the sober folk had gone to bed.
Charles (Host): This compulsive night walker has got four kids with another on the way. He loves planning parties. He writes so many letters to so many friends, it's dizzying. He just spent half a year in America, which he hated, to his surprise, as much as to the surprise of Americans. And on top of all that, he's a tireless social crusader, happy to play England's Jiminy Cricket in stories, articles and brilliant speeches. I promise I won't evoke Hamilton every episode, but I can't help sounding like Burr shouting "Hamilton wrote the other fifty one" every time I think about Charles Dickens. The man is non-stop.
Charles (Host): Dickens could not be more different from his most enduring creation "That squeezing wrenching, grasping, scraping covetous old sinner."
Charles (Host): And yet there's more than a little bit of Charles Dickens in Ebenezer Scrooge, as we'll investigate. A bit of who Dickens has been, who he is, and maybe a bit of who he fears he might become. And I think it's that hint of authorial empathy that ends up being the key to Scrooge's enduring appeal. The narrator may treat Scrooge with nothing but contempt, but the author is a very creative and very sensitive young man who can't help but empathize with every one of his characters, even the ones who stand for everything he rails against. They are all staring back at him in the mirror, after all.
Charles (Host): The serial Dickens is in progress on when he writes a Christmas Carol, Martin Chuzzlewit - which you might think is a name I just made up to sound Dickensian, which kind of proves the following point - is his first major commercial failure as a writer. He even begrudgingly has to return 50 pounds to his publishers.
Doctor Who clip: Gotta say, that American bit in Martin Chuzzlewit, what's that about? Was that just padding or what? It's rubbish that bit. I thought you said you were my fan. Oh, well, if you can't take criticism...
Charles (Host): Now I say "as a writer" because Dickens is no stranger to hardship. When he was 12, his father was sent to Marshalsea Debtors Prison and his whole family went with him, except for Charles, who had a - oh, I hesitate to say a job - ...who was compelled to work at a blacking factory where he glued labels onto bottles. He lived with a mean old lady, and he made barely enough to support himself during that year. No one knows this about Charles Dickens in 1843. He won't even admit it to his closest friend for a few years. Dickens carried this around like a burden, this feeling that his childhood had been stolen from him - by parents who couldn't see how important those formative years were to him, by a broken system. As much as Dickens invented the notion of Christmas as we know it, he invented our notion of childhood. In Oliver Twist and Tiny Tim and many future heroes and heroines, he provided a critical template for seeing children as experiencing something magical that needed safeguarding - childhood - as opposed to seeing them as little adults with little fingers that could perform manufacturing tasks that big adult fingers couldn't. When Dickens saw the second report of the Children's Employment Commission, he was...
Charles (Host): "Perfectly stricken down by the sleek, slobbering, bow-pauched, overfed, apoplectic, snorting cattle..."
Charles (Host): …that could create such a thing. So Scrooge is his straw man. Simple as that.
Charles (Host): Dickens starts from the evils of his day, namely the dragon of ignorance, as he put it in one speech, and then he works backwards to create the perfect embodiment of their perpetrator, Mr. Prisons, workhouses and surplus population. Easy enough. But then Dickens does something rather remarkable after creating this wheezing miser, this odious, stingy, hard, unfeeling man, he takes us back to his past and... there's this lonely boy, a boy with nothing but 1001 Nights and Robinson Crusoe to comfort him, a boy not unlike Dickens himself, abandoned by his family. (Though Dickens only wishes his abandonment could have been at a school.) Both Scrooge and Dickens have sisters named Fan. You can't tell me Dickens did not consciously put a bit of himself in Scrooge. I think some bits unconsciously slipped in as well.
Charles (Host): "If the representations I have so often made to you about my working as duty and not as pleasure be not sufficient to keep you in the good humor which you of all people in the world should preserve, why then, my dear, you must be out of temper and there is no help for it."
Charles (Host): "If a feeling of you know not what, a capricious restlessness of you can't tell what, and a desire to tease you don't know why give rise to it, overcome it. It will never make you more amiable, I more fond, or either of us more happy."
Charles (Host): Maybe you think I'm reading from some Christmas Carol deleted scene, something that explains why Belle leaves Scrooge on that bench. But in fact, that is from the courtship of Catherine Dickens (nee Hogarth) and Charles Dickens. Charles is more than a little bit of a jerk when it comes to Katherine, and that does not go away. It gets much worse. He'll end up spending years shaming her for her weight gain and her clumsiness, and eventually, after 22 years of marriage and 10 children, plus multiple miscarriages, he'll end up divorcing her, never seeing her again and taking up with a much younger woman. Or, as Simon Callow put it...
Charles (Host): "In other words, he behaved like many men who have fallen out of love with their wives, except that he was Charles Dickens, and everything in his behavior was proportionately magnified."
Charles (Host): One of those magnified aspects is Dickens nature as a workaholic. As previously stated, the man was non-stop. He was constantly working on a deadline for some serial article or editorship, and he never let that stop him from engaging in countless side projects. What began as a young man's vigorous ambition - Oh humor him, he's coming up in the world - it turned rather sad. He ended up estranged from most of his children, and obviously estranged from his wife, and he subjected himself to an American tour late in his life that one son thought was essentially what killed him. He couldn't stop.
Muppet Christmas Carol clip: "You're a partner in you're own firm now. Barely clearing expenses. You said the partnership was the goal. This is for you. I love you, Belle. You did once."
Charles (Host): The Belle scenes, where Scrooge's fiancé ends their engagement and where we visit her and her husband the day Marley died, those have always struck me as the least convincing part of a Christmas Carol. They act as a signpost to show us that at some point the carefree clerk at Fezziwig's was consumed by greed, without really pinpointing when or why that change occurred. Side note: I really love what the 1951 Alastair Sim version does to flesh out this progression; it provides Fan's death as the tipping point.
Charles (Host): Belle has to do a lot of heavy lifting in her breakup speech to help us understand what a young Scrooge might have acted like. But now, knowing a bit more about Charles and Catherine's courtship - about her begging him to stop working so much and him unable to be a mere mortal man, striving for more while telling her to be quiet already... it adds this sort of haunting dimension to Belle and Ebenezer. I think there's a smidgen of projection going on here on Charles Dickens' part, and maybe it's intentional. Probably it's not. I'm just saying he knows from dismissive fiancées.
Charles (Host): So what then becomes the difference between Scrooge and Dickens? If we accept that boy Scrooge is basically boy Dickens, and that young clerk Scrooge is full on nostalgia Dickens, and that park bench Scrooge is a shadow projection of Dickens' own workaholic tendencies... Where do they branch off? Where does one become this miserable miser and the other a social crusader?
Charles (Host): Would it be to trite to say the adoration of the people? I know that that makes it sound like Dickens was an egomaniac and that we should all strive to be adored. But Dickens had a fascinating relationship with fame. He saw it as a two way street - as in you saw him, sure, he was going to go out of his way to see you. And this is the other big thing to understand about Dickens, probably the reason he sounds so harsh when his girl asks him to stop writing so darn much. Dickens had a need, a compulsive need that bordered on obsession, to be ever present in people's living rooms, to see them and make them feel seen. Because Dickens published all his novels serially, he was sometimes less like a novelist as we think of novelists and more like a writer on Scandal or Empire, checking Twitter to see how the audience is reacting to the work. He could gauge their feelings, take the temperature of the room. He could take inspiration from their hopes. Or he could toy with those hopes. Or he could crush them, as he did with Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop. But he cared deeply what they felt. There's a great story about Dickens essentially pouring his heart into his sort of veiled autobiography, David Copperfield, and he gets a letter from a woman who realizes she's the inspiration for one of the stories misanthropes the dwarf Miss Mowcher.
Charles (Host): "I have suffered long and so much from my personal deformities, but never before at the hands of so gifted a man as Charles Dickens. Now you make my nights sleepless and my daily work tearful."
Charles (Host): So Charles Dickens, touched, changes the entire nature of the character on the spot, he changes his story, how he planned for it to go. Now, in part, this could only happen because, of course, Dickens' penchant for serialization allowed it. But it could also only happen because Dickens was uncommonly sensitive to his readers. Any reader.
Charles (Host): "I would at once sit down upon their very hearths and take a personal and confidential position with them."
Charles (Host): That's Dickens pitch for The Cricket, a weekly periodical he was proposing that would allow him to maintain a more constant companionship with his readers. That idea eventually petered out, though it would serve as the inspiration for his third Christmas story The Cricket on the Hearth. But he'd end up pitching a similar idea, The Shadow, a few years later.
Charles (Host): "A cheerful, a useful and always welcome shadow which may go into any place and be in all homes and all nooks and corners, and be supposed to be cognizant of everything, and go everywhere without the least difficulty."
Charles (Host): Now that has to sound familiar.
Charles (Host): "Much they saw, and far they went and many homes they visited, but always a happy end. The spirit stood beside sickbeds and they were cheerful; on foreign lands, and they were close at home; by struggling men, and they were patient in their greater hope; by poverty, and it was rich. In alms house, hospital and jail, in misery's every refuge, where vain man and his little brief authority had not made fast the door and barred the spirit out, he left his blessings and taught Scrooge his precepts."
Charles (Host): It's this act that changes Scrooge. The act of seeing. Of experiencing. This is the undying optimism of Charles Dickens shining through. Not in the disbelief that there are harsh corners of the world - no one depicted them more vividly. No, that optimism is in this adamant belief that no man, no matter how hard-hearted, no matter how cruel, no matter how ignorant, could truly SEE and not change his ways - be made to see the world Dickens saw on his 20 mile walk through the slums and change his mind, change his perception, change his behavior. Think about Marley and his fellow spirits.
Michael Hordern (A Christmas Carol 1971 Cartoon clip: "It is required of every man that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow men - if it goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death! It is doomed to wander through the world. (Shriek) Woe is me! And witness what it can not share but might have shared on earth, and turned to happiness!"
Charles (Host): In a Christmas Carol, Hell isn't being sequestered away in some fiery domain separate from the world of the living. No, it's being able to finally see the world and not being able to do a thing about it. This is the gift the ghosts give to Scrooge, and that Dickens gifts to England - the ability to be magically transported in an instant from mines to ships to homes as different as those of Bob and Fred, and from the past to the future. It's this kaleidoscopic, fast-paced journey into people's homes, onto their hearths. That's why my favorite adaptation of A Christmas Carol is also one of the shortest, an animated half hour from 1971 directed by Richard Williams and executive produced by Chuck Jones, two of the greatest animators of all time. The ghosts in this are bone chilling.
1971 Cartoon clip: "Business! Mankind was my business."
Charles (Host): This adaptation stars Alastair Sim actually, returning to the role he perfected in 1951. (Seriously. Sim is the best Scrooge that there's ever been. Maybe it's because the prolonged flashback section gives us a better idea of who Scrooge is, but Sim really gets Scrooge. He gets how Scrooge wouldn't yell his pronouncements or growl them. He just says them like people say the things they believe on a daily basis, and he gets how pathetically funny this guy is in the face of his hauntings.)
1951 Sim clip: "You will be visited by three spirits. But... Was that the chance of hope that you mentioned Jacob? It was. Oh well in that case, never mind, I think I'd rather not."
Charles (Host): But then 20 years later, in this 1971 version... He's passable. He's not meant to be a voice actor.
1971 Cartoon clip: You, are you the spirit sir? Who... whose coming was foretold to me?
Charles (Host): And that's the biggest disappointment about it? But to be fair, he doesn't have a lot of time to make an impression. This thing is rocketing along once the ghosts show up, and this is the beauty of this adaptation. If the 1951 movie is a case study for how you expand on a classic, giving it new life by addition, then the 1971 version is its soulmate. This is how you find the stripped down essence of a story and give it new life by subtraction. Because think about all the Christmas Carols you've seen... Every adaptation always does the same scenes, right? We measure an adaptation by those standards, so we get the whole scene. And these are the greatest hits, the whole Cratchit dinner, the whole bed curtain scene at Old Joe's. And now that the adaptation is running short on time, we usually end up having to elide over countless other great scenes - the miner's, innocence and want, revisiting Belle, seeing the spirits outside the window, wanting to help that mother and that baby. These are the B sides. The brilliance of the 1971 cartoon is that it treats the greatest hits and the B sides exactly the same. It hits pretty much everything that Dickens wrote, but in these loose, psychedelic sketches, using just enough of Dickens dialogue to give you the essentials but never overstaying the welcome. Just as you're getting acclimated, boom. Quick cut. Strobe light. And you're in the next place.
1971 Cartoon clip: Good heavens. I was a boy here.
Charles (Host): This is really important because it's not just seeing Tiny Tim or seeing Belle or seeing his own grave that brings Scrooge around. If you believe it's any one of those things, then his transformation is unconvincing. It's seeing all of it, every last scrap. Scrooge is finally able to see what Marley only saw upon dying, and he realizes it's never too late to change. This is the power of Ebenezer Scrooge.
Charles (Host): I'm going to leave you guys with a snippet from an article that Dickens wrote in his weekly periodical Household Words - and yeah he actually did finally do it, he finally got a weekly periodical and found his way into people's homes. It's called "What Christmas is as We Grow Older" and based on that title, based on the fact that Dickens had lost his father, lost his sister and lost an infant daughter in 1851, the year it was written, I assumed this would be an absolute bummer to read. And it's not. And I think it perfectly evokes the spirit of Ebenezer Scrooge's transformation.
Charles (Host): "As we grow older, let us be more thankful that the circle of our Christmas associations, and of the lessons that they bring, expands. Let us welcome every one of them and summon them to take their places by the Christmas hearth. Welcome old aspirations, glittering creatures of an ardent fancy, to your shelter underneath the holy. We know you and have not outlived you yet. Welcome old projects and old loves, however fleeting to your nooks among the steadier lights that burn around us. Welcome everything. Welcome alike what has been, and what never was, and what we hope may be to your shelter underneath the holly, to your places round the Christmas fire where what is sits open hearted. In yonder shadow, do we see obtruding furtively upon the blaze an enemies face? By Christmas Day, we do forgive him. If the injury he has done us may admit of such companionship, let him come here and take his place. If otherwise, unhappily let him go hence, assured that we will never injure nor accuse him. On this day, we shut out nothing. 'Pause' says a low voice, 'nothing. Think...' On Christmas Day, we will shut out from our fireside... nothing! 'Not the shadow of a vast city where the withered leaves are lying deep the voice replies, not the shadow that darkens the whole globe, not the shadow of the city of the dead.' Not even that! Of all days in the year, we will turn our faces towards that city upon Christmas Day and from its silent hosts bring those we loved among us. City of the Dead, in the blessed name wherein we are gathered together at this time, and in the presence that is here among us according to the promise we will receive and not dismiss by people who are dear to us. Yes, We can look upon these children, angels that alight so solemnly, so beautifully, among the living children by the fire and can bear to think how they departed from us. We had a friend who was our friend from early days with whom we often pictured the changes that were to come upon our lives and merrily imagined how we would speak and walk and think and talk when we came to be old. His destined habitation in the city of the dead received him in his prime. Shall he be shut out from our Christmas remembrance? Would his love have so excluded us? Lost friend, lost child, lost parents, sister, brother, husband, wife. We will not so discard you. You shall hold your cherished places in our Christmas hearts and buy our Christmas fires. And in the season of Immortal Hope and on the birthday of Immortal Mercy, we will shut out nothing!"