Before the Movie
As a Dickens-phile, I will be prejudiced. Please note this in advance. My opinion on anything about Charles Dickens and his works is that if it is half-well-done then it is a great addition to the world. I have written this down before I see the movie as a reminder to you and to me.
The Movie
Wow! I liked it. The basic plot is a short period in the life of a young Charles Dickens as he endures frustrations and elations while writing A Christmas Carol. The movie is made for writers, aspiring writers, Dickens lovers, other good-hearted manic-depressives and people who enjoy The Carol. It would help moviegoers to have as much knowledge of the Dickens literature and milieu as possible, but it is not mandatory.
I would suggest a quick read of The Carol before you go.
As the movie’s trailer gave this away, you already know that the characters come to life. They all begin to take shape and are fitted, like the strange puzzle pieces that they are, into this curious tale that has become part of our picture of Christmas.
Why did Charles Dickens use ghosts in his Christmas story? How did he create these strange characters? Can people really change the way that Scrooge transformed? These are a few of the questions for which the movie poses answers.
A couple of facts from the life of Charles Dickens are important for a complete understanding of the movie’s premise. First, Charles Dickens’ father was a spendthrift, who spent time in debtor’s prison. While his father and the rest of his family languished in prison, a very young Charles Dickens pasted labels on bottles of boot polish for twelve hours a day in a decrepit factory.
Now on to the Spoilers!
The movie is set to a ticking clock for dramatic effect. After the roaring success of his first four novels, The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby and The Old Curiosity Shop, Dickens has not had as much success with his next three books. He decides to write a Christmas tale six weeks before Christmas. That ticking clock, as well as constant interruptions from his large family and monetary pressures, run Dickens into the ground. He becomes a bit of a louse.
What the movie does, then, is work two transformations at once. Not only does Scrooge change, but so does Dickens. As the author confronts and then comes to terms with his own past and his own present, he is able to transform Scrooge. The most effective scene in the movie involves Christopher Plummer as Scrooge inside a freshly dug grave as the earthen walls begin to move in on him. At that point, the Scrooge of this movie evolves, and that gives Dickens the belief that he can write a character who can transform from the very worst capitalist to the very best humanitarian.
With that bit of knowledge, Dickens has his ending for A Christmas Carol, and he can rush the manuscript to the printer in time for Christmas.
I personally believe that it is quite clear that Charles Dickens took inspiration for the transformation of the Scrooge character from a twelve-year-old American girl. I’m not kidding! Please see my section about Laura Bridgman below.
All in all, the movie was a fun Christmas romp—unlikely to become a classic—but it has a good heart and a happy ending, and if you have an aversion to those, then it is possible that you are in need of the kind of transformation that happened to Ebenezer Scrooge and Laura Bridgman.
This movie requires a special rating system:
“****” For Charles Dickens lovers who can soak up all of the references (and mistakes).
“***1/2” For those with a good working knowledge of A Christmas Carol.
“***” For those who come into the movie without those advantages.
Proof that Charles Dickens Is “The Man Who Invented Christmas”
That’s a pretty bold claim in the title of the movie! Is it true? I would call it “mostly true.”
There was nobody who had more of an effect on Christmas than Charles Dickens. It had been a pagan holiday that Oliver Cromwell almost completely eradicated from England. I will relate some of the ways Dickens fashioned a new holiday and affected how we celebrate it, but there are no doubt others. His effect on the holiday has been, if anything, underrated, even with the London Sunday Telegraph, on December 18, 1988, calling him, “The Man Who Invented Christmas.” Now we have a 2017 movie making the same claim.
The Christmas Tale and the Christmas Dinner
Dickens set the standard for a Christmas story. The Yakima Herald proclaimed on its front page on the 22nd of December 1892 that there was only one Christmas Wizard.
One piece in his Sketches by Boz volumes was a short story called The Christmas Dinner. Later, in 1837, Dickens wrote his first novel, The Pickwick Papers. Dickens devoted a couple of chapters in it to an idealized Christmas feast at the Wardle house in Dingley Dell. You know how little boys who’ve watched a Kung Fu movie will walk out of the theater performing exquisite judo chops and karate kicks? Every reader of The Pickwick Papers—and it was a worldwide hit—was equally intent on throwing (or being invited to) a Christmas party like the one in Dingley Dell.
In that same book, there was a chapter devoted to Gabriel Grubb, who was an early version of Ebenezer Scrooge. It was Grubb’s fate to be accosted by goblins, who showed him the meaning of Christmas. As you will see in the next section, the Goblin in that story was influential in the creation of Santa Claus, that jolly old elf.
Dickens published something about Christmas and just before Christmas for many years, creating, in us, an appetite for specialized Christmas fare. Besides the Carol, he wrote The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain, The Battle of Life, The Holly-Tree Inn, What Christmas Is, As We Grow Older, The Christmas Tree, The Christmas Dinner and many more.
How Santa Got His “Ho-Ho-Ho”
In The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton, Gabriel Grubb, the forerunner to Ebenezer Scrooge, displays a peculiar laugh, which is imitated in a frightening way. It is Christmas Eve night, and surly old Gabriel thought it a good time to ply his trade and dig a grave:
“’Ho! ho!’ laughed Gabriel Grubb, as he sat himself down on a flat tombstone which was a favourite resting-place of his, and drew forth his wicker bottle. ‘A coffin at Christmas! A Christmas box! Ho! ho! ho!’
‘Ho! ho! ho!’ repeated a voice which sounded close behind him.”
The unexpected voice behind Grubb belonged to the mischievous Goblin King.
I have tried—without luck—to locate that peculiar laugh in earlier Christmas material. Research does indicate that the phrase was used by Puck of Shakespeare fame and of Celtic and Norse legend, though not in a Yuletide setting. Puck, also known as Robin Goodfellow or the Hobgoblin, was a frequently mischievous woodland sprite. It seems that Charles Dickens may have borrowed a favorite expression of goblins and turned it into a Christmas tradition.
Clement Clarke Moore, who wrote ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas in 1823, never mentioned a belly laugh. He did describe Santa as “a right jolly old elf.”
Punch and Holly and Mistletoe and Turkey
You will find abundant Holiday Punch, Holly and Mistletoe in Dickens’ Yuletide fictions. I’ve tried Dickens’ punch, and it is delicious! In the Carol, he wrote about "seething bowls of punch that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam." Please be aware that this drink goes down fast because it is tasty. It is also alcoholic. The recipe calls for fire. Proceed with caution.
As for that strange American bird, the turkey, Dickens made it a hero of the Carol. This king of all poultry was equal in size to the boy dispatched to fetch it and twice the size of Tiny Tim. The colossal fowl could only be moved by horse and cab. Before this time, the goose was traditional Christmas fare, when not outlawed by Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans.
The Christmas Tree
Yule trees had been around for some time before Dickens wrote about them, but they existed mainly on the Continent. About the time Dickens published A Christmas Carol, Queen Victoria married her cousin, Prince Albert, and he brought the Yule tree tradition over from Germany. It caught on with the upper crust but was not as widely favored by the masses.
It was in 1850 that the Dickens magic made the Christmas Tree acceptable to the people. He wrote a short story entitled, “A Christmas Tree,” which was a child’s fantasy looking up at all the toys and other objects hung on the tree. Of course, the story had ghosts and dead children in it as well! Once Dickens accepted the Christmas Tree as part of the new tradition, who could stop it?
Santa Claus
The Jolly Old Elf may have started out a jolly old goblin or a jolly old ghost. There are forerunners as well from other cultures, but the Dickens stamp is seen on our Santa. On the right is the original illustration from the first edition of A Christmas Carol. (It plays a fun role in the movie!).The Ghost of Christmas Present looks somewhat familiar, doesn’t he? That appears to be a garment made of crushed velvet or similar material, with white fur trim, and there’s a healthy beard.
Now picture him with a gray beard.
In the Carol, remember, the Ghost of Christmas Present “grew older, clearly older, … it’s hair was grey.” Moreover the Carol’s Father Christmas was only active for one day every year. Christmas Eve.
Below you see the King of the Goblins, the same one who gave Gabriel Grubb the Scrooge treatment in The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton. The Goblin King was the forerunner of the Ghost of Christmas present depicted in the Carol, and he gave us Santa Claus’ hearty “Ho Ho Ho.”
Carols and Giving
Charles Dickens was the anti-Cromwell. The Puritans took over England when Oliver Cromwell seized power. The celebration of Christmas was outlawed before he took power, but Cromwell enthusiastically supported the ban. He employed sniffers who would travel into towns around Christmastime to smell for cooked geese, a sign that a Yule party was in the offing. The celebrants would be turned in and punished.
Wassailing was outlawed.
Cromwell was also responsible for instituting the Blue Law, which forbade shopkeeps from selling on Sunday—the one day on which working folks could enjoy themselves. Dickens reshaped the pagan holiday banned by Cromwell to one that celebrated giving. Caroling was sanctioned by Dickens and became popular again.
Legend has it that English Poet and Novelist Theodore Watts-Dunton was walking along Drury Lane in the Covent Garden Market area on June 9, 1870 when he heard a young girl respond to news of the death of Charles Dickens. She cried: "Dickens dead? Then will Father Christmas die too?"
The Story of Laura Bridgman
The most important gift wrapped up by Charles Dickens and carefully placed under our Christmas tree was an idea. The year before he wrote the Carol, Charles Dickens traveled to America and witnessed, first-hand, what was the single greatest transformation in human history. That inconceivable metamorphosis happened to a little girl named Laura Bridgman.
Bridgman’s history soars when she is introduced to a spoon and a key. But it begins at a darker time, years before, as her family dealt with a “puny” child subject to “severe fits, which seemed to rack her frame almost beyond her power of endurance.” The story gets darker still, as the Bridgman family soon fought a death struggle with Scarlet Fever. It killed two of Laura’s siblings, while she was rendered blind and deaf at the age of two and bed-ridden for months thereafter.
Laura Bridgman was condemned to a dark and soundproof cell, and it was a life sentence.
A man by the name of Samuel Gridley Howe took little Laura to his institute in Boston at the age of eight. He spent a great deal of time with her, finally falling upon the concept of using objects that Laura could hold and feel while she felt the names of those objects written in raised letters on paper labels. One day, understanding illuminated her face. Among the first words that Laura Bridgman learned were “spoon” and “key.”
She then demanded to know the words for everything.
Half a century before Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan, the single greatest transformation of a human being took place. Charles Dickens visited with her and her instructor at the Perkins Institute. He was inspired by the reality, as he put it, “that an Immortal soul might be awakened.” Does that sound familiar?
I believe that there is a little of Laura Bridgman in A Christmas Carol. Is it a coincidence that, a year after personally witnessing the greatest actual human transformation, Charles Dickens wrote a book that bestowed upon the world its greatest fictional transformation (Ebenezer Scrooge)?
The most precious gift that Charles Dickens bestowed upon us was not Christmas. It was the idea that, if just for a season, we can transform ourselves into a great and beautiful people. Such a gift will live forever! For example, Robert Louis Stevenson noted this about A Christmas Carol:
"I don't know that I would recommend you to read the Carol, because it is too much, perhaps. But oh, dear God, it is good--and I feel so good after it, and would do anything, yes, and shall do everything to make the world a little better...."