Last night I watched the George C. Scott version of A Christmas Carol. It has become a holiday tradition of sorts for me: every Christmas season I try to watch at least one of the film versions of Charles Dickens’ classic story of a mean, miserly skinflint who is haunted by the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future on Christmas Eve. All of the films present creditable versions of the story, but I particularly like the George C. Scott version because he is so believable as the initially heartless, but ultimately redeemed, Ebenezer Scrooge and because it adopts, verbatim, many of the lines penned by Dickens .
A Christmas Carol was first published on December 19, 1843, meaning that the still-vital character of Scrooge celebrates his 178th birthday today. Dickens, who by then had already begun his long and successful career as a novelist, came up with the idea for the story only a few weeks before, when he went to speak at the Manchester Athenaeum, an organization devoted to helping the urban poor. Dickens was personally receptive to the plight of the downtrodden and impoverished people of England; his father had been thrown into a debtors’ prison, and Dickens had gone to work in a factory at age 12.
Dickens initially thought of publishing a pamphlet on the problems of Want and Ignorance (later personified in his story as the gaunt and frightening children under the robe of the Ghost of Christmas Present) that he would call “An Appeal to the People of England on behalf of the Poor Man’s Child.” But he soon decided his appeal for generosity could be more persuasively presented as a story, and we can all be grateful for that, because it allowed him to create one of the great fictional characters and story arcs in the history of literature. By turning what would have been a dry political polemic into a story, Dickens could couch his message in a powerful tale of regret and redemption. And because he was a masterful writer, Dickens could answer key questions–like how did Scrooge get to be that way?–that allowed him to turn a greedy, unfeeling monster into a sympathetic character by the end of the story. Who doesn’t pity Scrooge and root for him to open his heart, change his ways, and hear Tiny Tim say “God bless us, every one”?
I like watching A Christmas Carol because it inevitably causes each viewer to reflect on their own lives and their own decisions and–hopefully–resolve to become better people in the days to come.
Webner House 