Twixtmas time is here
Weariness and drear
Rest for all
That adults call
The limbo of the year.
Eggnog in my hair
Wrappings everywhere
O that we
Will never see
Another fruitcake here.
Fully enjoying A
Christmas Carol involves you in a pact with Charles Dickens: do you
accept the possibility that a unsurpassably selfish and heartless miser can, in
the space of one night, be transformed into a sweet, lovable philanthropist?
Are there two Scrooges? Or does Scrooge suffer from a split personality?
Watching any of the several film versions of Dickens’s A
Christmas Carol that are available forces the viewer to enter into the
same pact, but with the filmmaker. The story is so familiar and we have seen so
many adaptations of it that we can no longer deal with Dickens himself, but
with all the actors who have been blessed or cursed to be cast in the role –
some good and some bad. In the former category I would place Michael Hordern,
who played Scrooge in a BBC adaptation in 1977, and Michael
Caine who was the only flesh and blood actor in A Muppet Christmas
Carol in 1992. But there have been several that fall into the latter
category, from the first Hollywood Scrooge, Reginald Owen, who seemed too tired
to work up much of the required nastiness or sweetness in the role. Or Alistair
Sim, who is probably the most popular Scrooge, but who, while doing nicely with
the cheerful Scrooge, was quite unconvincing as the scowling one.
In his review of Michael Caine’s performance as Scrooge, Stanley
Kauffmann wrote in an aside, “(The best, by the way, was the forgotten Sir
Seymour Hicks in 1935.)” I watched it on Christmas Eve, and Hicks’s is
certainly one of the best performances in the role.
Within days of its publication in 1843, A Christmas
Carol was subjected to several stage adaptations for which, because of
lax copyright enforcement in England at the time, Dickens was paid nothing.
These stage adaptation lasted well into the 20th Century, and
Seymour Hicks (b. 1871) first played Scrooge in one of the most popular productions
in 1901. It was so popular that he appeared as Scrooge in the very first film
of A Christmas Carol, titled Scrooge, in 1913. So it is
only fitting that the first sound film adaptation in 1935 should feature Hicks
again in the title role.
But the film itself is an extremely mixed bag. Directed by Henry
Edwards, it suffers from one serious shortcoming: it makes no imaginative or
technical effort to show us the three spirits who visit Scrooge during his dark
night of the soul. But the atmosphere of Victorian London, especially its signs
of extreme poverty, is effectively evoked. They get the London fog right,(1)
and the details of the street scenes are interesting in themselves. But Jacob
Marley is restricted to a not very scarifying voice (the conceit that only
Scrooge can see him is used), the Ghost of Christmas past is nothing but a
light shining behind Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is a little
more than the huge pointing shadow of a finger.
That leaves us with Seymour Hicks, who occupies nearly every scene
(except the truly horrible ones in which scavengers divide the spoils of a dead
man’s – Scrooge’s – bed linen and nightshirt). Hicks is convincingly grasping
and heartless (Dickens devoted two paragraphs to Scrooge’s inhuman coldness and
hardness) in the first scenes, moved and terrified by the scenes revealed to
him by the spirits and wonderfully, giddily joyful upon his transformation. But
the success of Hicks in showing the extreme contrast in the reformed Scrooge
from his former self raises a serious problem with the role itself.
Because the easiest way to accept the peculiar mystery of A
Christmas Carol is to assume that Ebenezer Scrooge is either a dual
personality or two people – Scrooge and his doppelganger, his double.
The pact to which Dickens requires us to agree is the faith that
Scrooge can be changed, that he can be reformed from a
heartless sociopath into a compassionate, loving human being.
In Stave Three, the Ghost of Christmas Present transports Scrooge
to the house of Bob Cratchit and Scrooge sees how Bob’s poor family enjoys
their Christmas feast, the goose and plum pudding. And Bob calls out,
“A Merry Christmas to us all, my dears. God bless us!”
Which all the family re-echoed.
“God bless us every one!” said Tiny Tim, the last of all.
He sat very close to his father’s side upon his little stool. Bob
held his withered little hand in his, as if he loved the child, and wished to
keep him by his side, and dreaded that he might be taken from him.
“Spirit,” said Scrooge, with an interest he had never felt before,
“tell me if Tiny Tim will live.”
“I see a vacant seat,” replied the Ghost, “in the poor
chimney-corner, and a crutch without an owner, carefully preserved. If these
shadows remain unaltered by the Future, the child will die.”
“No, no,” said Scrooge. “Oh, no, kind Spirit! say he will be
spared.”
“If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, none other of my
race,” returned the Ghost, “will find him here. What then? If he be like to
die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
Scrooge hung his head to hear his own words quoted by the Spirit,
and was overcome with penitence and grief.
“Man,” said the Ghost, “if man you be in heart, not adamant,
forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered What the surplus is, and
Where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may
be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live
than millions like this poor man’s child. Oh God! to hear the Insect on the leaf
pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust!”
Dickens strenuously avoided direct political commentary. In 1843,
the French Revolution was still fresh in people’s minds. Dickens wrote about
the event in A Tale of Two Cities, published in 1859. There were
rumors that such a revolution could happen in England, especially given the
horrific conditions that the Industrial Revolution had inflicted on the poor.
But the most that Dickens would say about the condition of English
society was summed up by George Orwell: "His whole 'message' is one that
at first glance looks like an enormous platitude: If men would behave decently
the world would be decent.” Dickens couldn’t see the point of a change in
living conditions if there wasn’t also a great change of people’s hearts. That
is what he dramatizes in A Christmas Carol – the change of
heart that must come to even the worst people among us. Its believability is
always subject to question, and nothing reveals the importance of such
questioning than every time A Christmas Carol is enacted in
the pages of a book, on stage or on a film or television screen.
This year, after my 62nd Christmas, I’m inclined
to disbelieve in Scrooge’s metamorphosis. I won’t deny the beauty of it as a
Christmas fable, and the beauty of its great arc in a compassionate work of
art. But I can’t say I believe any more that the Scrooge we meet in the first
stave of A Christmas Carol, played on film by Seymour Hicks or
Alistair Sim or Michael Hordern, can be reconciled in any way with the Scrooge
we meet on Christmas morning. It’s a lovely and moving fairy tale, and all the
more beautiful for being so impossible.
(1) “The fog came pouring in at every
chink and keyhole, and was so dense without, that
although the court was of the narrowest, the houses
opposite were mere phantoms. To see the dingy
cloud come drooping down, obscuring everything, one
might have thought that Nature lived hard by, and was
brewing on a large scale.”